On a recent UK hospital reality show, they introduced a patient weighing in at 270kg - and you thought 270lbs was bad! He had various problems and was being considered for a gastric band operation, because, among other problems, the doctors were detecting kidney problems due to his obesity. Except he wasn't fit enough to have the operation to reduce his obesity - not fit enough due to his obesity!
I always wonder how people can get so seriously obese. "Well after I got married I started to put on weight" he said. Really? Call me naive and taking a somewhat simple view of things, but to get to 270lbs you have to eat a lot of food every day and not take any exercise. So how much do you need to eat regularly to get up to 270kg??? It doesn't happen overnight you know, and eating less while taking more exercise will help. So someone chose to eat vast amounts of food and chose not to do any exercise, and kept doing this for a very long time. Should we have sympathy for someone doing that?
In the UK, the health service is paid for by tax payers, enabling anyone to get medical help that they need without the burden of expensive insurance policies. There's no need to worry about visiting a doctor as you don't need to be able to afford any treatment or drugs prescribed in the vast, vast majority of cases. That's a very good thing in my opinion. But should we be paying for the care of someone as obese as 270kg, or even a "mere" 270lbs? There's a certain self-induced factor in cases like this, and I loose my normal sympathy for those in an unfortunate situation.
Obesity is well known to cause kidney problems, leading to transplants or dialysis. Surely at some point someone should have mentioned that this sort of level of obesity is life threatening. Even at the 270lb mark it's life threatening, and I'm sure some doctor must have mentioned this to the patient.
I really can't understand how someone can get themselves into such a situation, or even get to 270lbs far less 270kg. And why did their family keep giving in and feeding them the huge amounts of food that it takes to get them up to this size. I might be making myself unpopular saying this, but hey, it's my opinion.
