CNN Health

Hi Everyone, This morning I read an interesting article on CNN.com about the surgery. Some of you might want to check it out. They(being the people with Medicare) did a study on people who had the surgery and the morality rate. It seems more and more that they are trying to get people to reconsider the surgery. I personally believe that it saved my life. I am almost 4 months post op..I have lost approx. 70 lbs and feel great. Of course there are some side effects(beef is not my friend), but hell when you add it all up I would rather have the few side effects rather then the previous medical issues I had (diabetes (injecting 4x a day) and looking at a possible heart attack(mom had her 1st at 34 and uncle died of a massive heart attack at 36)) The one thing that I keep going to is research, talk to several surgeons, get opions from different people, both positive and negative. I finally decided to have my surgery done thru Emory, they run you through many hoops but it is for a good reason, they check everything from A to Z and I appreciate them doing that. On thing that they did say in the article is that an experienced surgeons that know the proceedure usually has a lower moratlity rate, and I agree with this. One thing that some fail to relize is that you are rearranging your anatomy, and that this is more then a life changing surgery. If you are not willing to make the changes, then you will be doing yourself more harm then good. I believe that the success stories will show that the people that are willing to make the change, they tell you this is just a tool. And that is the honest truth. And with anything if you dont or cant use the tool properly stay away. Sorry for ranting, its just that it amazes me that people dont stop to think things through sometimes. And I know that some of you that are a year or more out and have lost massive amounts of weight know what I am talking about. I also wanted to see what everyones thought on this article is, (ok so since I have been in school we are doing studies on different disscusions, pro/cons things of that nature, I have doing a majority of my on gastric bypass...go figure right....lol) Ok Ill stop now... Have a good day everyone

I saw one on NBC Nightly news.... One thing that ticks me off about these new staticstics.. is that the death rate is never broken down- I mean by that... they dont mention the patients risks when they went into the surgery....ie.. if they had an exsisting condition. Secondly, and I dont mean any disrespect here, but the study was done strictly on medicad patients, who always dont have access to timely health care.... Its my openion that something deeper is going on here. I know that a lot of insurance companies have been stopping their coverage of WLS.. makes you wonder if they are supporting this outburst in the news this week.... heck or even paying for it!

Michelle, I, too, saw the piece on the evening news. My mom had seen the "teaser" at the beginning and called me. What they didn't tell on the news and was reveiled in this morning's newspaper was that the study was done on people ages 23 to 44, which means they were on Medicare already because of other serious health issues. I was so irritated that they didn't report what caused the deaths, whether the patients had been non-compliant, and even showed one doctor who said the lap-band would make gastric bypass obsolete. Wrong! Medicare doesn't ever pay for lap-band, as they consider it unreliable. It's disgusting how much news is distorted and incomplete. For this reason I seldom watch the news, prefering to read the paper and "Google" anything that I want more info on. Barb C.

Erica, I couldn't agree with you more... ..I don't mean to sound radical..... but..... when I was still in school one of my favorite professors taught us that if you want to really learn something about particular medical condition/medication/procedure etc, DON'T waste time on bad articles, poorly designed studies and not very reputable publications....there are so many components that commprise a good study that I'm sure if you run that particular article through "check list" it will fall apart piece by piece. I wish you included a link to that article as Iwould love to try totake it apart myself... ...And I'm not even going to start on "sensentionalism" being one of the main Media and Press drivers/motivations. On the other hand, of course, nothing is ideal, and this surgery in and of itself is not a magic solution to the issue of obesity, nor is it an "easy way out"... blah-blah-blah... but it's all whole different topic. Now...I'm off my soap box..... Hugs to all Rita.

Here's the link...and it IS a sadly done study when you read the 'parameters' and qualifiers. http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/294/15/1903