AllBodySurgery.com

As a society, have we gone completely mad?

Last year, over 200,000 Americans had weight loss surgery. www.asbs.org/Newsite07/resources/press_release_cbn_11107.pdf Over nineteen million Americans have Type II diabetes, and of these, an estimated 78% have a body mass index in excess of 35, and thus are considered eligible for weight loss surgery. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/health/research/23diabetes.html?_r=1&oref=slogin At approximately $30,000 a pop, the cost of performing surgery on every one of these individuals would be well in excess of 400 BILLION dollars. Before we go any farther down this road, maybe we ought to step back and take a look at where we are going. We live n a society in which cutting open an individual's abdominal cavity and rearranging his intestines is considered "normal," and the idea of expecting an individual to exercise a modicum of self-control is considered, well, crazy. I repeat: have we gone completely mad? A third-generation freethinker To Primordius Drool: We are also the descendants of people who evolved brains precisely so they could recognize that circumstances had changed and adjust their behavior accordingly.

Public Comments

1. yah. in fact, we've gone so mad that, like you said, going mad is normal.
2. America can't be that bad because they throw more food away than the Africans do. If they can throw away about another 3 times more then maybe they will be getting somewhere.
3. when the "free" market becomes all-important, everything becomes a commodity: surgery, justice, government, and education are no exceptions.
4. And women (and men at some times in history) used to commonly use powder to whiten their faces that contained arsenic. And some would wear corsets so tight that they had to invent "fainting" couches because they couldn't breathe. Doing idiotic things for the sake of appearance is nothing new.
5. Sure, we as a society have become so self indulgent that we also think that its fine that we not only need huge McMansions, but on top of that, we need off site you store it places for the added stuff that we can't cram into the houses. How about we just cram less food into our gullets, and cram less crap into our homes ? Its also telling that the pop culture is so completely feminised, because 85% of all discretionary consumer spending is controlled by women, and most such surgeries, and more, are done for female clients. How about you gals give us 35% of that spending money, and ease up on the Cherry Garcia ? Oh, and no more Oprah.
6. that was interesting until the part about free thinker came in. that scared me usually that is a sign of deseption.
7. And the fat get fatter. Hooray!
8. We are the descendants of people who lived long enough to become our ancestors by eating all they could when they could. Our genes do not know that famine is unlikely; they sure don't know that we now live in a time and place where food is superabundant all the time. If you're not among those who find fighting their genes in this regard a difficult task, consider yourself lucky.
9. Humans have always been obsessed with looking good, or at least what is considered to look good at the time, its really nothing new.
10. Yes - but society has always contained certain aspects of madness in the pursuit of perfection. The only difference now is that the methods are "bigger" and "better".
11. That's still not a huge proportion of Amricans. (Lss than a tenth of a percnt -- my frickin' E key is wonky, STILL!) I saw a thing on 60 Minuts recently that has got me thinking. Whn you'r sleep deprived, the mechanism that tlls you to eat or not is out of whack. I wonder how much of our obsity problem is due to constant, chronic lack of sleep. Very vry few get 7 hours a night rgularly. Might also account for much of th rage and general poor judgmnt.
12. This whole world is not behaving "normal", in any way. People are programed to love material things instead of people. Someone's "worth" is estimated from the viewpoint of other humans on what they have accumulated, instead of what kind of a person they really are. Many people have spent their entire lives in vain pursuits, only to suddenly realize that they were wasting their time buying what they don't need with money they don't have, just to please people they don't like. This is the sad reality of this world as it is. King Solomon summed life up accurately in the book of Ecclesiastes. This attitude is reflected even more so in the world as it is today. If you realize the root causes of world, distresses are mostly based on human greed, self - interest, ignorance, inept government, and apathy. The political and commercial systems have an entire history of not working and the earth and every aspect of life itself is adversely affected, people have suffered in many different ways, and now the earth is even threatened. The answer and solution to the" world of ills" cannot come from the same source that made it that way in the first place. This has already been acknowledged many years ago, " To earthling man his way does not belong. It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step". Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Bible accurately foretold that humans would reach the point where they would be" ruining the earth". Revelation 11: 18, also Jer.10:23 and Psalm 146: 3