Should all diabetics go under the knife?
Here's an idea: Bariatric surgery for everyone!
Well, okay, maybe not for everyone, exactly, but for all people with type 2 diabetes. Which is still a pretty shocking prospect.
A group of researchers at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center have started a clinical trial testing whether surgery is the best medical treatment for controlling type 2 diabetes.
Yep, you read that right -- gastric bypass surgery, until now reserved for severely obese patients, may soon be the go-to treatment for overweight (which doesn't take much, really) and mildly obese people. For the trial, fifty people will be randomized to receive one of two treatments -- surgery, or "traditional" therapy with lifestyle modification.
If the researchers like what they see, millions of people could go under the knife for "diabetes surgery."
You know, it's really amazing to me that the mainstream would invest so much time and energy -- not to mention willingly subject people to numerous serious risks -- in investigating such drastic "solutions" to chronic illness and disease when there are so many simple, safe, and EFFECTIVE natural ways to conquer them. (I know, I know, follow the money...but please allow me my musings here.)
Just a quick search of the archive at www.wrightnewsletter.com turns up a slew of possible answers for diabetes management, including substances as common as cinnamon ("The common spice that could control diabetes," 5/8/2009).
We have to fight for doctors to put natural treatments first. To go for simple and safe, to focus on diet and nutrients and whole-body wellness over knives and patent medicines.
But until the mainstream is willing to, for example, try out a cinnamon regimen before going for broke with surgery and pills and...here's a thought...actually WORK with the patient to find what's right for that particular patient, we're going to keep running in circles.
I'll never forget what happened when one of my best friends cured what she'd always thought was rheumatoid arthritis by eliminating gluten from her diet. She'd been on five prescription drugs, and some of them had some pretty scary side effects. The very first day of her gluten-free diet was miraculous -- she stopped taking the drugs and has never looked back.
Exciting, yes. But what really makes it unforgettable is how her mother's doctor responded when she went to him wondering if going gluten free might work for her (after all, it's a genetic thing). She'd suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for most of her life, and the prescription drugs she took to manage it had landed her in the hospital with life-threatening infections a couple of times.
Face-to-face with this woman who had been in pain for so long, as a result of both the arthritis and the drugs he'd prescribed to her, the doctor didn't bat an eye. "Oh, yeah," he mused. "I heard a while back that can work really well for some people."
I often think of this a little sadly. I mean, I'm so glad she finally found, through her daughter's research and experience, a solution to her life-long pain (going gluten free happily worked for mother as well as daughter).
But I wonder how different her life might have been if her doctor, upon learning about the ways in which celiac disease and gluten intolerance can ravage some people's bodies, had said, "Hey, I have an idea about something we can try..." instead of picking up that prescription pad.
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Christine O'Brien writes the e-letter Health eTips for Dr. Wright's Nutrition and Healing.
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Comments
Anonymous
Thank you Alice for these two great real-life stories (turning off rheumatoid arthritis with gluten-free diets)! It is SO true what you write about! There are many possible Diabetes 2 solutions, including Cinnamon and the therapeutic essential oil Ocotea. Thanks for bringing all this forward - we really appreciate it!
Stephanie F.
Anonymous
Opps! So sorry - just checked the writer - CHRISTINE O'BRIEN! MY APOLOGIES. I didn't look to check.
Boomer12k
Maybe they should test it out on obese mice, rats, gerbils, hamsters and monkeys first....
MusherMaggie
To say nothing of what a gluten & dairy-free diet could do for diabetes as well!
Lori
Food is medicine. But we don't get that. When something goes wrong in the human body, which conventional medicine tends to view as merely a combination of independantly working parts (we don't even view our cars that way), the course of treatment is to remove it, suppress it, or tweak it in some way that goes against the inherent laws of homeostasis. Type 2 diabetes is 100% preventable ( the "p" word most doctors don't have in their vocabulary) and curable (the dirty little "c" word that makes conventional medicine cringe) with food. Supplements are great, but they're supplemental to whole, real food. Bariatric surgery is no cure, and causes a host of problems that seem to be swept under the rug. What are we thinking??
Rabbit
Sorry, they won't be doing bariatric surgery on me any time soon. I had two friends. One, Claudia, put herself on a strict diet and lost 200 lbs. She kept to this diet by eating by herself. Her husband supported her and did all the family cooking while she merely slept. She only ate 300 calories a meal. This was 20 years ago. She has kept the weight off to my knowledge and is healthy.
The other friend was even fatter and she went under the knife and had bariatric surgery. She became severely vitamin deficient in the next 6 months. She could eat only liquid food. She then had to have another surgery to open her stomach up so she could eat a little more. She then seemed to do a little better for awhile, but she had mental difficulties. Later on, she died.
I have found that if I don't diet at all, I stay about the same weight and sometimes even lose a little. If I think of it not at all, I sometimes lose a significant amount. If I think about food and dieting all the time, I lose about 16 pounds and then it slowly comes back even with the same diet. I think the fatties who accept themselves may be onto something.
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