This week the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the approval of a new device aimed at combating obesity. The new device is a stomach pump that is attached to the abdomen via a permanent port. After meals, or whenever, it pumps the recently eaten food directly into the toilet.
The device is meant to treat morbidly obese people for whom all other efforts at losing weight have failed. That’s understandable. But how is it different from the binge-and-purge cycle of bulimia? Its critics have argued that this device is medically assisted bulimia.
Leave aside the sheer wastefulness of dumping food directly into the toilet and try not to get hung up on whether the nutrient-rich undigested food is appropriate over the long run for a septic system designed to handle human waste as processed by the digestive system and ask simply, how can this be a federally approved treatment?
Especially when the FDA is reluctant to approve or even allow studies of alternative treatments for cancer, addiction and other just as significant health issues – it seems odd (and disgusting) to allow a semi-permanent stomach port for manual evacuation of food.
The editorial staff of The Valley Reporter considered this when discussing a story in this week’s paper about the use of the iboga plant to treat opiate and other additions. A Vermont House committee rejected a proposal to have the state host a three-year clinical trial on the efficacy of ibogaine for addiction this session.
Heroin and opiate addiction are the state’s most severe health crisis currently; it would seem that some out-of-the-box thinking on the problem might be in order. If the FDA can think so far out of the box on morbid obesity that they approve a box to pump the food out of someone’s stomach, perhaps minds need to be more open to nontraditional treatments for opiate and other addictions.
Obesity is a public health crisis, that’s a fact, and has all its own associated costs and health impacts, but does opiate addiction in Vermont and beyond have any fewer or less significant costs, risks and consequences? Absolutely not.
It begs the question of what guides the FDA: pharmaceutical products and profits or the health and well-being of those it is supposed to protect?
