When a person gains pounds a lot more than what is healthy, options of medical procedures get narrowed down to a few. Hospitals and doctors can only do as much and the countdown until the obese patient meets his/her grave begins.
In a thought-provoking article, Vox considers the patient's demise because of his/her high body mass index that led to fatal diseases. But more than that, the article talks about the failure of medicine to respond to obesity and provide the healthcare and treatment these obese patients direly need to save their lives.
Khan addresses her readers and the medical field to go further from just counseling obese patients to lose weight through diet and exercise. These obese patients are burdened by their weight and most of the time, their efforts to exercise leads to frustration because they run out of breath and experience muscle and bone pain.
One of the problems of medicine in response to obese patients is the minimum weight machines can accommodate. The article's writer, Farah Naz Khan, notes her personal experience when a patient was transferred to an academic tertiary care facility because she could not fit in the CT scanner available at her community hospital. There are also occasions when the patients use imaging machines for animals because they can fit there but as a result, the tests come out with poor quality.
According to the VOX article, MRI and CT scanners, nuclear medicine stress test tables and cardia catheterization tables can only accommodate patients weighing up to 450 pounds. So for someone who has morbid obesity, exceeding 450 pounds, there are no available machines to cater to their medical needs.
Another problem is the lack of drug therapies for weight loss assistance. Moreover, bariatric surgery only becomes a considerable option when the patient has documented 6 to 12 months of weight loss efforts.
Khan cites AspireAssist as a welcome device to help obese patients in their efforts to lose weight. As per Aspire's official site, the non-surgical and reversible device is FDA-approved that has helped patients lose three times as much weight on average compared to those who only received diet and exercise counseling.
AspireAssist works by helping patients remove 30 percent of their food intake from the stomach before calories are absorbed by the body. A thin tube will be placed in the stomach that would connect the inside of the stomach to a button on the outside of the abdomen. 30 percent of food is drained directly to the toilet while the rest is absorbed by the body for the nutrients it needs (via Aspire's official site).
For Khan, more researches and higher funding should be allocated to accommodate patients suffering from obesity. This is much more needed now that more and more people are becoming obese around the globe and the United States.
According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2013 to 2014, 37.9 percent of adults (20 years old and up) in the U.S. are diagnosed obese. In 2011-2012, 20.5 percent of adolescents (12-19 years old), 17.7 percent of children (6-11 years old), and 8.4 percent of children (2-5 years old) are also obese.
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