why can’t fat be removed, like a tumor, from the body in a safe more commonly practiced medical procedure?

Question

Wherever I turn people are wary of stuff like liposuction of other things like gastric ballooning. Why

In: 0

Answer 1

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.