Agree with
@Alamo basement dweller that they seem to always fall in the too thin or too fat variety. Unsurprisingly, being under or over weight makes you feel like utter crap. Instead of doing the hard work on their mental health and making lifestyle changes they latch on to often incurable, difficult to treat, or refractory health conditions that give them a free pass to not making any progress at all and continuing to complain about how sick they are without actually addressing the root cause. Medical interventions never work because they don’t want to get better, meanwhile they are getting fatter or thinner and feeling even worse than when they started due to iatrogenic harm (unnecessary surgeries, medication overuse) and increasingly sedentary lifestyle. Eventually most of them actually succeed in making themselves sick. Even just a few days of bed rest can have dramatic impact on your overall health:
Functional impact of 10 days of bed rest in healthy older adults
Meanwhile, I was pondering
@Polychromos comment about how doctors who treat these girls are seen and came across an interesting article in Pro Publica:
This researcher warned of unnecessary, risky vascular procedures. She was called a “nazi” and accused of “fratricide”
The tldr for those who don’t have the time/desire to read is that Dr. Caitlin Hicks looked closely at peers who seemed to be overusing lucrative vascular procedures on patients who did not need them. Nothing so severe as our MALS butchers, the surgery in question is atherectomies (to remove fatty deposits from leg arteries). Hicks and team disclosed the names of the suspect doctors to the Centre for Medicare and Medicaid Services and to the Society for Vascular Surgery only to have a “vocal contingent of doctors willing to fight for their freedom to perform the vascular surgeries as they saw fit”.
ProPublica cites an experience at the annual meeting for the Outpatient Endovascular and Interventional Society (amusingly at Disney of course) where an interventional radiologist stated: “That clinic patient, how well are you […] converting them into the codes that you can bill for them? [… ] [if that patient says] ‘I don’t want any more procedures,’ now that’s maybe something that you may not be able to bill for. So when I have a patient captured and captive on my table, I try to maximize how much I’m able to get.”
Well worth reading, and not behind a paywall, it provides links for further reading too. I’ll see what more I can dig up that speaks more directly to the surgeries we see most often.
In other news, I am having serious lactose withdrawal symptoms now that I am up to date on this thread. My morning coffee is just not the same. Any recommendations on other amusing threads with similar flavour to entertain me?
