firecat

The American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery created a PDF poster describing emergency room treatment procedures for complications from weight loss surgery.

I'm glad that the poster exists, but it's scary to see all the things that can go wrong. Also I know it doesn't cover everything (such as nutritional deficiencies).

I wonder how many people considering WLS are given this information.

http://www.asmbs.org/download/er_poster/ASMBS_ER_Poster9-20-10.pdf

Local copy

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/702846.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

flarenut

I'm sure people are given the information, just not in a form that makes any sense to them. One of the (many) problems with informed consents is that they load in so much horrific stuff you might as well not get hangnail surgery or a root canal. There's usually nothing about the day-to-day consequences of the possible complications, or about the likelihood of any of them. So all you really get is "Yeah, I could die or be put into horrible constant pain, the same way I could crossing the street" and whatever gut feelings the medical staff surrounding the procedure have managed to instill.

Now even without involving lawyers there are good reasons why a consent form can't give all that other information (the odds are different for each patient, each patient's perceptions and tolerances are different, blah blah blah) but that still doesn't help.

I'm reminded a little of one of the exercises in the childbirth class that J and I took way back when. Each couple got a deck of cards with options that might represent their idealized birth plan: home birth/hospital birth, water tub, midwife/OB, anesthesia/no anesthesia, classical music/elevator jazz blah blah and so forth. You were supposed to discard all the cards you didn't care about, and then keep discarding until you only had two cards left, and if those two cards weren't "healthy mother" and "healthy infant" you had just missed the point of the exercise (yeah we didn't get to keep those cards either).

Anyway, I think for weight-loss surgery (and perhaps a lot of other surgeries) that kind of exercise would be a useful one, and more useful than a standard consent form. Keep discarding cards and see where prospective clients don't want to play any more.