Why WLS?
By Sue Widemark

To say my research on weight loss surgery (WLS) which has now lasted over two years, has been eye opening is an understatement.

WLS seems like an onion. Every time I peel off a layer, I find - yet another - layer.

The digestive tract by itself, is fascinating... a total energy production plant, so carefully and perfectly engineered including it's own form of pasteurization to sanitize our food before it enters the bloodstream. The Gastric bypass, the most commonly done WLS procedure, partially disables the digestive tract to force the person on a starvation diet. Unfortunately while the small intestine re-configures somewhat, to digest some simple carbohydrates, many of the necessary daily nutrients are lost to the patient. By the way, they are still doing an intestinal bypass called a BileoPancreatic Diversion (BPD) (usually connected with a type of stomach stapling called a "duodenal switch") which bypasses over 60 percent of the small intestine.

Sadly I have found that there is a lot of misrepresentation regarding the surgery.

In most cases, the surgeons don't lie about side effects but minimize them and emphasize the weight losing aspect. They also, quote a lot of erroneous figures about how fat is so unhealthy and how the patients are going to die soon and how since all diets fail, surgery is their only option. (The fact that surgery is also a diet, only physically enforced, seems to elude many). Meetings for pre-ops are populated with happy faced post op patients eager to give their testimonies.

No one seems to notice that the majority of the WLS poster children are less than 2 or 3 years out from surgery. This is a sort of safe zone as, according to medical articles I've read, it takes three years after surgery, to be able to tell how the person will react to the procedure long term.

No one notices that some of the patients look like death warmed over. Afterall, they are THIN. They are healthy because they are thin, we are told.

And even more frightening was the fact that some of the WLS poster children are really quite ill, some to the point of no longer being able to work or live life normally.

One person appearing for a national ad, had one month before, written to a mailing list, that she was finding it increasingly difficult to speak positively to pre ops about how great WLS was because she had been sick for over a year now. But in the ad, she says she's a 'new person' because she had lost so much weight, forgetting to detail what a struggle it was for her to STOP losing weight.

Another person appearing in a national ad, was cadaverously thin and worn looking. But even though he had almost died in the two years since he'd had WLS, he told news services he was so happy he had the surgery. He has a 'bleeder' somewhere in his body and goes to the hospital every so often for transfusions. His surgeon glibly told a TV interviewer that he doesn't know where the bleeder is but they'll find it someday.

Sordid as those cases are, I have stumbled across the fact that the majority of patients seem to re-gain.