It’s 2015. If doctors don’t know how to operate on fat bodies. Then they shouldn’t be doctors. We have enough resources an equipment to deal with “obese” patients. There is no need for the medical community to continue fat shaming.
Let’s talk a little bit more in depth about how obesity affects surgical procedures.
In most serious, intensive surgeries, you’re probably going to be under anesthesia, right? And you’re probably going to have medications to take afterwards. Stuff like this filtered through the kidneys and liver.
Obese patients have much higher rates of renal hypertension, which affects the kidneys, and morbidly obese patients have a 90% likelihood of having abnormalities in their liver.
That all adds up to a really bad time, and drugs being filtered out of the system quicker and therefore not working as intended. And you really want your anesthesia to work right when people are cutting into you.
In addition to this, some weight-based drugs are affected by fatty tissue, and some are not, so this can cause problems in determining the proper dosage.
Obese patients are at a higher risk for deep-vein thrombosis – this is when a blood clot forms in a deep vein, like in the leg. Surgery is recognized as a risk factor for DVT, and so obese patients undergoing surgery are doubly at risk.
Finding veins in the patient is also made difficult – it’s the difference between finding the edge piece in a 1000 piece puzzle, vs finding it in a 100 piece puzzle.
It’s harder to monitor blood pressure in obese patients as well, as standard cuffs may not work due to there being too much fatty tissue between the blood vessel and the cuff.
When you’re performing surgery, you have to pull back the flesh and muscle to get to where you’re trying to operate on – the more you have to pull back, the more difficult this becomes.
This image shows how much more you’re having to work through when doing an operation on an obese person:
So no, it’s not a matter of doctors being bad at their job. Surgery by itself is a difficult and risk-laden process – adding obesity on top of that adds an uneccessary layer of additional risk and complexity.
Sources:
Palmer M, Schaffner F. Effect of weight reduction on hepatic abnormalities in overweight patients. Gastroenterology 1990; 99: 1408–13.
Albert S, Borovicka J, Thurnheer M, et al. Pre- and post-operative transaminase changes within the scope of gastric banding in morbid obesity. Schweiz Rundsch Med Prax 2001; 90: 1459–64.
Ramsey-Stewart G. Hepatic steatosis and morbid obesity. Obes Surg 1993; 3: 157–9.
Clain DJ, Lefkowitch JH. Fatty liver disease in morbid obesity. Gastroenterol Clin North Am 1987; 16: 239–52.
Marik P, Varon J. The obese patient in the ICU. Chest 1998; 113: 492–8.
Ribstein J, duCailar G, Mimran A. Combined renal effects of overweight and hypertension. Hypertension 1995; 26: 610–5.
Braekkan SK, Siegerink B, Lijfering WM, Hansen JB, Cannegieter SC, Rosendaal FR. Role of obesity in the etiology of deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism: current epidemiological insights. Semin Thromb Hemost 2013
Allman-Farinelli MA. Obesity and venous thrombosis: a review. Semin Thromb Hemost 2011; 37:903-7.
This is very true. When I had open heart surgery, there were various complications as well as problems with the anesthesia because of how fat I was. Thanks be to God my surgeon was top notch. But the fact of the matter is that if I was a thinner patient, the surgery would have been far less traumatic. In fact, if I had not put on so much weight, my aortic valve would have lasted me longer. So, yeah, biological and scientific realities are at stake when you carry too much weight.
I have seen some communities on tumblr try to push a “body positive” self esteem agenda by dismissing health risks of obesity as fat bias.
Yes. You can be beautiful no matter what your body looks like.
No. You cannot always be healthy regardless of what your body looks like, and while self confidence is important, taking care of yourself and addressing health problems-including being overweight- is important.
Thanks for someone being honest and real about the risks of obesity and the medical field
the signs as gf episodes based on their release dates
aries:
carpet diem, boyz crazy
taurus:
no episodes but! you get gravity falls TV and Fixin' it with Soos shorts
gemini:
tourist trapped
cancer:
legend of the gobblewonker, headhunters, hand rocks the mabel, the inconveniencing, dipper vs manliness, land before swine, dreamscaperers, a tale of two stans
leo:
double dipper, irrational treasure, gideon rises, scary-oke, into the bunker, the golf war, dungeons dungeons & more dungeons
virgo:
the time traveler's pig, fight fighters, sock opera, soos and the real girl, the stanchurian candidate, the last mabelcorn, roadside attraction
libra:
little dipper, summerween, little gift shop of horrors, Dipper and Mabel vs the Future
scorpio:
society of the blind eye, blendin's game, Weirdmageddon Part 1
sagittarius:
the love god, Weirdmageddon 2: escape from reality
capricorn:
u get nothing but the cold dark Hiatus
aquarius:
boss mabel, Northwest Mansion Mystery, Weirdmageddon 3: Take Back the Falls
pisces:
bottomless pit, the deep end, not what he seems
ALSO, if you own Prismacolors Color Pencils and they keep breaking off no matter how much you sharpen them, they are cracked from the INSIDE.
This can be fixed by putting them in the microwave for no longer than 3 seconds! A little thing my art teacher taught me and has come in handy like heck!
OOOOOOOOOH~!!!
re-blogging to save a life
Microwaves save the day again. That’s awesome
ok but you have to remember to scratch off foil lettering on a prismacolor pencil first haha
Me:
Sees a male-female close friendship that never turns into romance and is instead a platonic relationship where both of them support and care for one another without any expectation for anything else Me:
Starts applauding while tears of joy roll down my face unheeded
For years, most victims of revenge porn — people who have had their nude photos shared online without permission — basically couldn’t do anything about it.
According to one study, over 50% of all adults engage in sexting, and 70% admit to having received a nude photo online or over the phone.
And yet, despite the fact that we all (or at least more than half of us) do it, there’s still this weird, persistent, harmful notion that if your naked pictures get leaked or shared maliciously by an ex online, it’s your fault for taking them in the first place.
It’s completely backward, but sadly, the law seems to at least kind of agree.
As of September 2014, New Republic found, putting someone else’s illicit photos online without their consent was illegal injust 16 states, though laws have been proposed in more states. Not only is it typically impossible to prosecute the perpetrator, they note, it’s impossible to legally compel websites to take the images taken down most of the time.
I know we say block us if you don’t like us but to block us right after “calling us out” so we can’t defend ourselves from your stupid accusations is really childish, it’s like plugging your ears in real life so you can’t hear someone which is very immature.
Star Wars has basically done the opposite of product placement. Instead of real life brands creeping in to the film, the film has crept in to every brand in real life.
Imagine that, for an hour a day, Mettaton lies down and feels like trash. Imagine that one day, Alphys asks about it, and Mettaton replies, “It’s a family tradition.”
