Comments on: More Dangerous Dissembling

By: Spillah

Spillah — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 22:21:56 +0000

I’ve only seen two stories on James’ WLS, and to me that isn’t “widely reported.” (The libel aspect is just an extension of the larger point about the reasons for primary reporting. It isn’t a fact, journalistically, simply because a magazine said it was.)
And to put the two ideas together in a 300 word piece about James’ hospitalization IS to speculate.
But all of this misses my point, which is that an AP wire is just that, an AP wire. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a piece about WLS and Etta James. I’m saying one has no way of knowing what the process was that resulted in her WLS being left out of the piece. Maybe it was ignorance, or maybe it was that the publicist was being a jerk and denied the WLS, but most likely, it was because the point of the piece was to say that James was in the hospital, period. Someone wants to dig further than that, they can and should, but I think it’s pushing it to blame the AP for not mentioning it.

By: Big Fat Deal » The Zone Diet

Big Fat Deal » The Zone Diet — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 14:01:53 +0000

[...] Harding has also written about this issue recently: Weight loss surgery doesn’t just make you thin; it makes you physically unable to eat large [...]

By: betsyl

betsyl — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 02:12:03 +0000

i just want to say it could *totally* be a hernia operation.

after all, my mom has had two hernia operations due to her wls.

By: Mary Garden

Mary Garden — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 19:01:37 +0000

Hey there,

I’ve been out of the journalism business for a few years (and wasn’t exactly a hot shot even then), but if a reporter is really concerned about being dinged for libel, she can always cover her ass by using the hoary old “allegedly” or “as reported in May of last year by ____.”

In this case, though, I hardly think anyone would go to the trouble, any more than they would list attribution for Paris Hilton’s arrest after it had already been widely reported.

By: spacedcowgirl

spacedcowgirl — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 18:27:59 +0000

BStu, OT but your review of those marketing materials reminds me that I HATE it when “my children were ashamed of me” is promoted as a good reason for weight loss. Is it really healthy (for you OR the kids) to internalize your children’s beliefs about your body, whatever those might be, and undergo major surgery because of them? That puts a ton of responsibility on your kids’ shoulders and validates their beliefs about weight (which are probably fairly mixed up and influenced by their peers, kids’ natural tendency to be embarrassed by their parents, etc.) as if they are little adults. It also lends an awful lot of credence to the idea that it is OK to shun people, even if they are your own mother, for being fat. What happened to teaching your kids to respect their parents and other people, regardless of their weight? (If your son or daughter said “I’m embarrassed by your wardrobe” or “I’m embarrassed because our house isn’t nice” it would send a terrible message to respond “You’re right, Junior, so sorry, what you say goes and I’ll change those things immediately”). And what happens if Mom dies in surgery and it comes out that she got the surgery in part because she felt bad that the kids were embarrassed? That is some therapy fodder right there. The whole thing changes the parent-child dynamic in a way that I don’t think can be healthy.

The twisted cherry on top of the screwed-up sundae here is that it often seems that these people’s kids are not ashamed of them (or, you know, no more embarrassed than every kid is of his or her parents) until the parent projects so much self-hate and shame that the kids also adopt that attitude. If you ever want to despair for the future of humanity, read that awful book “Diary of a Fat Housewife.” The author is ragingly depressed and seems to pull her whole family into her destructive downward spiral, but thinks that all of her problems are caused by her weight. There is a part where she claims that her daughter said that Mom’s weight was the worst problem her family had and from how it is worded, it’s clear that the author basically browbeat the daughter into “admitting” that and validating her own screwed-up view of things. It’s incredibly dysfunctional and the mom’s weight was absolutely NOT the real problem, nor do I think it really ever is in that situation.

Immobilized at 300 lbs.! Ha! I’m glad I didn’t know about that because I guess I should have taken to my bed at 276 pounds instead of working full-time, going to the gym, and doing activities with my husband and friends. I was under the apparently mistaken impression that I was capable of the same things as everyone else. Silly me.

(However, I think people do realize deep down that this is not a good reason to cite for weight loss or WLS, because if nothing else it’s pretty fucking shallow. If you push them on it they modify it to “I mean, I want to be alive to watch my children grow up” and then they are immune to ever losing an argument again because it’s all about the children.)

By: BStu

BStu — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 17:41:35 +0000

Indeed. Supposed reversability is a selling point with lap-band and I can’t think of any other procedure where even possible reversing is any more than an after thought and one I’m sure the surgeon would caution against expecting too much from. With lap-band, its part of the marketing materials.

(Aside, I actually just ventured to a lap-band site to confirm that its part of the marketing materials and it sure was. I also found out that at 5′9″ and 240lbs that YES! I qualify. The “success” stories are horrible, too. Mom’s who got chopped up out of fear that their child would hate them for being fat. A woman who called her maybe 300lb self “virtually immobile”. Another mom afraid of embarassing her child.)

Rachel you raise a good point. While those behaviors would ordinarily be called anorexia or bulumia, they are usually just congratulated when practiced by fat people and clinically aren’t acknowledged, either, as when a fat person develops an eating disorder its just given a catch-all diagnosis. I’ve seen it for myself, the adulation heaped on a fat woman who was developing anorexia. Its scary just how much is okay with fat people in the name of weight loss.

By: Meowser

Meowser — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:00:44 +0000

Lauredhel, that’s why I said “are thought to be reversible,” rather than simply “are reversible,” because I know the actual evidence on that is pretty equivocal. Probably I should have made that a little clearer, sorry. You can never just revise and re-revise body parts like you’re rearranging furniture; there’s always a risk that something can’t be “undone.” The point is, doctors aren’t “selling” those procedures to people by telling them “you can always have it reversed,” unlike WLS.

By: Rachel

Rachel — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 15:04:14 +0000

BTSu saud: There is nothing that WLS does which you could not do without surgery. Nothing. The only problem is that without surgery, its usually called anorexia or bulimia depending on how it works for the individual.

In my case, it was both. The funny thing is, no one ever asks me if I had an eating disorder. It never even occurs to them that losing 175 pounds in one year might be unhealthy. They just ask “Oh my gosh, did you have WLS?”

By: lauredhel

lauredhel — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 14:15:21 +0000

“there are other surgical procedures that are thought to be reversible, in particular sterilization procedures such as vasectomies and Essure-type tubal ligations. ”

Essure procedures are absolutely not reversible, and many vasectomies aren’t either. Vasectomy reversals can fail either because it’s just not possible to get the ducts healed back together, or because of sperm auto-antibodies. The Essure procedure places a spring like device in the Fallopian tubes. The device doesn’t occlude the tubes on its own – it causes inflammation and scarring in the tubes, eventually blocking them (this is why you need three months and a dye X-ray to prove that your tubes are blocked before it can be pronounced a success. Once fibrosed, the only reliable way to get the implants out would be to remove the Fallopian tubes altogether. It would be theoretically possible to get pregnant via IVF after Essure, however there are no data on the outcomes of pregnancies with the implants in place.

I know this is off topic, but I’ve seen a few people bandying about the “Essure is reversible” factoid, and it’s 100% false and a potentially dangerous belief.

By: Fillyjonk

Fillyjonk — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 14:15:07 +0000

This “reporters have to tread so very very lightly” crap just tans my hide. You know what? We get people calling in ALL THE TIME, all butthurt over something we wrote. We’ll listen to them, often more patiently than they deserve, and sometimes we’ll publish their comments with our rebuttals, but we don’t stop writing true things because we’re scared someone might get their panties wadded. In fact, upstairs in the National Press Club there’s a “journalist’s creed” that says basically that.