Fat teens? Band them – problem solved!
Well, well, well… if it isn’t another little gem by our good friends O’Brien and Dixon from CORE at Monash University… Yee Ha! This time they are all about banding teenagers. Yup, you read that right..
TEENAGERS.
You see they did this trial with a bunch of kids using the age old methods of diet and exercise and the kids only lost an average of 3kg. The kids who were banded however, lost an average of 35kg. So of course, banding IS THE ANSWER! ™.
I watched an interview with John Dixon this morning in the National Nine Morning News and I couldn’t believe the crap that spewed from that man’s mouth… One of the pearls of wisdom that he revealed was that the band doesn’t work without making ‘lifestyle changes’ as well. The same ‘lifestyle changes’ that had his trial group lose an average of 3kg each… please tell me how important those lifestyle changes are for maintaining the band initiated weight loss (ie starving one’s self)? Mind you, Dixon didn’t mention that the ‘lifestyle’ group was not given adequate support. The current recommendations around the amount of physical activity needed on a daily basis for that age group, is 60 minutes. O’Brien and Dixon’s ‘lifestyle’ group were only doing 30 minutes of physical activity per day. Personally I don’t think it would have made much difference to up it to an hour but it still illustrates that the study was biased in favour of the banded group. Dixon also continually insisted that the band doesn’t ‘block the stomach off’ rather that it ‘represses hunger’. A gastric band narrows the passage food needs to pass through to enter the stomach. Liquid fills are added to the band to make the passage even narrower, permitting even less food through. In theory, banding recipients can only eat ‘small meals’ and are satisfied faster while remaining so for longer. Sounds like lay person’s terminology for blocking off the stomach to me – the passage is made smaller by the band, to me that means a blockage. Perhaps not in you-beaut-edumacated-professor terms but in fat blogger terms, I am hearing ‘blockage’.
I have spoken to many, many people who have gastric bands. I have yet to speak to ANY banders who either do not experience vomiting , sorry – productive burps; hair loss or one of the other many common side effects of banding, or alternatively, who have lost virtually no weight at all since having the band inserted (or who have lost weight and then regained it, without increasing their food intake or any of the other crimes against banding that they are accused of). One woman I know vomits every single day. Her hair is falling out. She has an ulcerated esophagus. Another woman I spoke to exists on potato chips alone because it is the only food she can eat without vomiting. Yet another eats nothing but soup. All day, every day. Another had to have her gall bladder out within months of her banding and now has chronic diarrhoea which leaves her running to the bathroom within 5-10 minutes of every ‘meal’. A guy I know with a band eats the tiniest meals and still only lost less than a pound in several months. Yet most of these people (not all) will enthusiastically tell you that their banding has been a HUGE success! Personally, I don’t call those sorts of side effects ‘successful’. But these people are all adults. They are not minors. What O’Brien and Dixon want to happen to fat teens amounts, in my mind, to child abuse.
28% of O’Brien and Dixon’s banding group (teenagers remember) had to have a ‘revisional procedure’ within 2 years of the initial placement. That means they had to go into hospital again, be put under a general anaesthetic again and have the band replaced. No small thing. Six of the eight need the new band had suffered ‘pouch dialations’ which in turn caused heartburn, vomiting or reflux. Two others had ‘needle-stick injuries’ to the tubing. This means the person doing their fills stuck the needle in the tubing rather than in the port and as a result, the saline already in the band all leaked out and the band had to be replaced as it was now defective. Another patient had to have their gall bladder removed – again, another trip to hospital, another general anaesthetic, a longer recovery period than that for the banding and of course, no mention of the subsequent side effects of having the gall bladder removed (such as chronic diarrhoea). Another participant was hospitalised for depression but the researchers nicely blame that little episode on the existing mental health status of the teenager and the marital breakdown of the parents during the study time-frame. There were two pregnancies in the cohort of banders, one suffered a miscarriage and the other delivered a ‘healthy infant’. As far as a I know, there are no long term studies on the children of mother’s who were banded prior to the pregnancies. Another participant was ‘lost to follow up’. Gee I wonder why? Could it be that this teen wasn’t losing weight and was too ashamed to continue with the follow up because of the blame placed firmly on the heads of ‘banding failures’? I guess we will never know but I think it is a highly possible scenario considering what we already know from adults that banding has failed.
The researchers go on to claim (in not so many words) that all these fat kids were miserable prior to banding and most definitely on their way to an early grave. They then say the banders end up having increased self esteem, family activities, physical movement and general health while the opposite was true for the non banders. It is also reported that
No changes occurred for either group in general behaviour, mental health or family cohesion during the study.
Interesting that self esteem isn’t considered mental health… and if banding didn’t change (improve) any of those elements then basically it has been carried out simply for the loss of weight – in other words, to conform to social ideals regarding appearance and physical ‘health’. I guarantee that if we didn’t live in such a fat-hating world that the fat kids would participate and enjoy physical movement more than they do now, that they could be likely to be want to be seen in public more (or have their families want to be seen in public with them more) and would generally feel better about who they are and their place in society. Guarantee it.
So yeah, instead of supporting a variety of human existence as best we can and empowering those individuals to be the best they can be as they are, or even promoting a HAES lifestyle approach, let’s just run all the fat kids to theatre and wrap what amounts of a rubber band around their perfectly functional stomach in order to make them into what wider society thinks they should be.
If you have enough sanity points you can watch an item about this study as it appeared on national TV tonight.
One of the pearls of wisdom that he revealed was that the band doesn’t work without making ‘lifestyle changes’ as well.
It certainly works in terms of profits for the manufacturers the medical professionals and so on who make money out of this.
That explains it all really.
Hi Bri,
You’re right, banding teens *is* child abuse. There’s a huge difference, to my eyes, of a self-loathing fat adult bullied into the band (it’s still abuse, but hang with me), and a self-loathing fat teen bullied into the band.
For one thing, many teens are self-loathing or at the least self-unsure; it comes with the territory. Teens are trying to find their place amongst their peers, and there’s a lot of comparing and contrasting of differences. So they’re vulnerable, suggestible, easy to manipulate—especially fat teens who are usually made to be hyper-aware of the social unacceptability of their body type.
Also, and I can’t stress this enough, *they’re still kids.* In a practical and certainly legal sense, they’re aren’t entirely responsible for even self-abusive decisions and behavior — the adults caring for them are, and it’s up to these adults to help guide these children *away* from self-abusive desires, and to protect them from external abuse.
So how, oh just how, is effing with a child’s healthy stomach directing them away from abuse from within and without? It is, quite directly, delivering them both into real physical torture (assuming they weren’t chronic vomiters and had all their hair before the surgery, if you catch my meaning), and into the hands of those who have abused them due to their fat in a more social way by cooperating with the terrorists, as it were?
Thanks for this post. It’s heartbreaking, it really is…it takes me back to my teen years and how my dad encouraged me to be on diet pills loaded with ephedrine and then praised me as I wasted away…but it’s so important to highlight these abuses.
I can only hope that one day one looks back at all these stomach manipulations the same way we look back on lobotomies.
I find any type of bariatric surgery disturbing beyond belief. I realize that my opinions are less personal, as I’m not fat enough to qualify for WLS, but it still just seems like surgically induced anorexia to me.
I was so saddened when my father told me that our neighbor’s daughter, who just turned 22, had Lap Band surgery recently. I wish her the best, but it’s so hard for me to believe that this was a choice that will actually benefit her health.
I have been studiously avoiding all these news stories on the teen banding because I haven’t many sanity points left this week.
When I was a fat teenager, I probably would have jumped at the chance to get a lap band. And not cared about the side effects, like all those people with chronic vomiting and such who say it’s “worth it”. That’s because I was an average teenager with a lot of body insecurity and self-esteem issues!! I didn’t have an adult brain yet and I did many silly things, as teenagers do, either (and sometimes simultaneously) trying to rebel, fit in, and alternately piss off my parents or make them happy. And engaged in stupid diets. Surgery to look thinner would not have been appropriate in any way, shape or form.
It is misguided at best, child abuse at worst, for a parent to allow a child to have surgery like this, especially when truly long-term follow-up, as in 10+ years, on the lap band shows that its success is about as good as traditional diet-and-exercise weight loss, and with far more serious side effects.
There was a psychologist speaking about this study this morning on the Today show, and while not really on the HAES bandwagon, she did point out that we have an anti-fat society and of course teens would want to lose weight even with extreme methods like surgery. She also seemed convinced that obesity was caused by “psychological problems” (and in some cases it may well be) but did make the point that slim children ALSO suffer from mental health problems, low self-esteem, and so on, and we should be addressing these issues in the whole teen population, not just trying to fix a possible external physical manifestation of them in fat teens. [I think this psychologist could be brought over to the HAES side...anyone want to send her some literature?
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In addition to the other wrongs of banding teenagers that have already been covered quite well, how about the fact that teenagers are often STILL GROWING??? I’m talking about vertical growth and maturing of bones and internal organs. Putting kids on the sort of diet enforced by the band and other forms of weight loss surgery can inhibit healthy growth and maturation.
Child abuse, indeed!
I heard this article on radio yesterday and came darn close to my own ‘productive burp’. As far as I could make out, the gentleman from CORE was saying that he recommends this for teens who may not even BE suffering from health concerns (you know, apart from the social isolation and depression that is probably not really helped by having people in positions of authority treat you in this way). He seemed to be recommending it for very overweight teens who are currently actually HEALTHY – on the basis that, you know, being fat is obviously destined to lead to blah blah blah.
I can’t get over this. We’re talking about kids. Young, lovely people who have absolutely no power in this. People who should feel as though they can trust those in authority – not be medically maimed in the interests of ‘health’. FAILFAILFAILFAILFAILFAILFAIL.
I look forward to readong more critiques of this study: they are already starting to appear. Thank you for blogging it!