Wherever I turn people are wary of stuff like liposuction of other things like gastric ballooning. Why
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As a general rule, doctors don’t want to cut you open. It leaves the door wide open for complications like a serious infection. An operating room is a limited resource in a hospital, super-sterile and doctors scrubbing up before going in. This is not meant to be a casual thing – it is for saving lives when the alternative to cutting the person open is them being dead, or at least something serious like unable to walk.
Also, if someone’s fat, they got that way somehow. Fixing their being fat by removing it doesn’t treat the underlying cause and it’s prone to just happen again in a year. If you can get someone eating properly and exercising, the fat will go away on its own. Yeah it’s slow but they’ll manage. And now you know the problem is actually solved.
Fat is an organ. It’s tissue cells with their own “vascular system” (blood supply). When it’s removed, there is bleeding and trauma and the body needs time to recover from it.
Tumors aren’t “safe” to remove in many cases either. It may be diseased tissue, but it’s still connected to a blood supply and other healthy tissues so cutting them out can be problematic and cause damage with side effects.
We remove tumors anyway because we generally expect the cancer will continue to grow and eventually spread. When the options on the table are “a surgery” or “death” the surgery is more attractive up to a certain level of pain and risk. There are still “inoperable” tumors where surgeons feel the operation to remove the tumor is going to cause fatal or debilitating damage, and in those cases people just have to live as best as they can.
But there are *usually* healthier ways to remove fat. They aren’t fast. They take work. But in the cases where the person’s fat is coming from a health condition that can’t be fixed with diet and exercise, it’s *also* usually the case that:
* The person is so obese their health is already in jeopardy.
* So much fat needs to be removed the body will be very stressed by it.
* Removing the fat won’t fix what’s generating it in the first place.
That makes liposuction a very not-attractive surgery. If you just want it for cosmetics it’s painful and isn’t going to be permanent unless you do the things that would naturally burn the fat anyway. If you need it because of a condition causing out-of-control weight gain, it’s sometimes hard to tell if the obesity or the surgery is more likely to kill you. And even when it makes a person more able to exercise, some people with rare conditions end up developing all of that fat over again. It’s a lose-lose because we can’t fix those conditions themselves.
Look at it like if you had a functional third arm somewhere inconvenient. Lopping it off still hurts really bad and causes your body stress. So annoying as it might be, you’d probably have a hard time finding a doctor who’d cut off a healthy limb as an elective procedure.
Firstly, because fat is spread in and around other organs all through your body. You have fat in your muscles and around your internal organs. Not just under your skin. It’s not localised like a tumour. Secondly because if it could be removed and then the person continued to eat in the same way, they would just develop new fat. This would be particularly true with such sudden weight loss because your eating habits would be enough to sustain a much larger body. Losing the weight by eating better also helps train you to eventually keep the weight off by not continuing to overeat.
Removing tumors isn’t safe or easy either, it’s just worth the risk because the tumor is killing you and there’s no other way to get rid of it. If you could exercise a tumor away, doctors would tell you to do that and use tumor-removing surgery only as a last resort, like how we use liposuction now.
Not even getting in any technicals, it doesn’t solve the problem. That’s like refurbishing the classrooms and moving the school across the street to boost failing grades
liposuctions (the removal of fat) are a safe procedure and an extremely common procedure practiced by plastic surgeons. However, just because they are safe and common doesn’t mean they are without risk, much like the removal of a tumor; common procedure but with several risks.
The premise of your question is incorrect.
Unlike a tumor, fat cells are connected to almost every square inch of your skin. It also has many purposes. It can’t just be snipped out. Liposuction is very painful and can have serious consequences.
Answer: there isn’t really a strong reason that fat *can’t* be removed. When liposuction was invented, a limit was placed on how much could be taken out as both a crude number and a percentage of a person’s total body fat. Whichever was the lower number was the limit.
That limit has never really been challenged since. The reasoning at the time was that a person could not tolerate that much loss of fat without going into shock.
We now know that not to be true, based on trauma studies and radical interventions for diseases like Necrotizing fasciitis. A person can have a great deal of their body fat removed with very limited consequences, particularly using modern methods.
The main issue is that fat removal is not seen as a cure, only symptomatic treatment. It is a radical procedure to perform, to literally cut someone out of their fat. If it is not going to cure an underlying condition, there is very little impetus to perform such an operation.
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