Real Medicine

My attention was drawn to the story of Abdul Jabbar Tunio. He is a Pakistani vegetable seller who's been felled by a haywire metabolism. This has produced aggressive weight gain over the last 20 or so years of his life. Matters have come to a head and he is currently in intensive care having reached 42 and a half stones /595lbs/270 kgs.

Due to the factors that have produced this gain, Tunio has gone from being immobile over the last few months to a state of semi-consciousness.

What's quietly compelling about his story is the entirely sane, honest and apt responses of everyone concerned. His family are genuinely grief-stricken and have searched vainly over the last few months for means to remedy his condition.

Jabbar’s brother, Abdul Haleem Tunio, and his nephew stare at his body, lying in a bed in the ICU, with heavy hearts. “Jabbar has been unable to drink, eat or talk since the day he arrived at the hospital on Tuesday,” Haleem told The Express Tribune with tearful eyes.

They did not see him as just a "shut-in" or someone getting what he deserves. A political representative got involved and acted in a perfectly straight-forward way;

The 39-year-old patient suffering from morbid obesity was brought from Larkana to the JPMC on Tuesday on the direction of Pakistan Peoples Party chairperson Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.

[My emphasis.]

The response of the medical professionals has been what you'd expect from people who've trained for years to heal the sick.Though unsure what do, they are "trying hard to stabilise him". Guided by basic medical protocol. The lead doctor- Javed Jamali described him as "suffering from a rare medical condition".

Even the health minister got involved;

[The] health minister Dr Sikandar Mandhro also visited the patient on Wednesday and directed the hospital administration to constitute a medical board for Jabbar’s treatment.

That medical board will consist of,

....a general physician, general surgeon, nephrologist and chest physician to investigate the cause of the weight gain.

Medics, not dieticians, nutritionists, psychologists, social workers, but specialist medical professionals.

They did not have the means to accommodate his body, so,

According to Dr Jamali, they have ordered a made-to-order bed and mattress for Jabbar.

No whining and whingeing about the awful inconvenience of a very sick man, being brought to a place to treat illness and injury.

Now, not being aware of any back story, I've no idea if there's more to this than meets the eye, but in a way, that's kind of irrelevant as what rings true is the attitude of all concerned. They are reacting to someone who's sick.

I could barely find one bum note in any of the responses reported. Even the journalists talk of his "bloated body" though unnecessary, in such a rational context, it doesn't attain any edge. Talk of 'obesity' only troubles in the sense that it may get in the way of the mission. The only time I briefly snorted was when at an earlier hospital, the family was told he could only be treated at a prestigious big city hospital or abroad.

It's comparatively easy to keep pointing out that the foul idiocy that passes for a response to weight in the West has been deliberately engineered by a crusade involving health bureaucrats, researchers and medical professionals. It is quite another to see it this clearly by getting a sense of how it would look in the absence of such. Imagine all that could have been achieved.

We're currently at the point where some are trying to deny medical treatment and others are busily trying to engage in mass stomach removal. We are at that point because we chose to be and want to be here. People want to go along with excluding others from medical treatment.

It's a regressive backlash, the indulgence feeling we are too spoilt and need to feel life red in tooth and claw. That somehow it is immoral to attempt to avoid meaningless suffering and abuse.

It's worth noting Pakistan is a Muslim country, purported by crackpots to be a medieval throwback in modern times. Ironically, a lot of those types love the 'obesity' crusade and howl when it is challenged even though that's mostly weak and on terms dictated by it.

Imprisoning millions in a pathological and incompetence outlook will generate little but cost. If answers are found for Mr Tunio that will serve and/or inform others. Bigotry costs. Quackery costs. Mutilation costs. Mal intent costs. Regression costs.

Real progress saves more than lives. But people want it to generate costs to fulfil the idea of pricing individuals like cattle.

I'm sure many can see this now, but its still worth having a clear idea in your mind of how things could have been and still could be if people committed unequivocally to ending any collusion with such. I hope Pakistan can keep this up, they might even stumble over some real answers.

'Obesity' crusade degeneracy is the real contagion I find. People who start off with something like this level of decency can with enough effort by the influential, be turned into the sour hate fuelled trolls, we know and are bored by. 

A small detail. Mr Tunio's metabolic problems started when he was 18 and broke his leg.

Breaking a bone is a big shock to your whole body. It's normal for you to receive strong messages from parts of your body that aren't anywhere close to the fracture.

This reminds me of the late rapper Biggie Smalls,

He'd always been a somewhat husky kid, but at age ten he fell off a city bus and broke his right leg in three places..... His leg was in a cast for six months. Laid up in the house with nothing better to do, he ate, putting on pounds that stuck around long after his leg healed.

Along with a small but consist number of examples of people's metabolic derangement either starting with or being taken to a new accelerated level of aggression after breaking legs-other bones too, but given they're our biggest limbs....

Trauma, disrupted signals flying about, inflammation, could well surge through the system, setting this kind of gain in motion. In the West attention is fixated on increased intake of food or alcohol, but it should be relatively obvious that is an increased demand for energy.

Perhaps the need for healing and to make new cells is amplified excessively and that is added to the abundance of signalling.

The aim should be to calm that response as much as possible. One thing to try would be to calm the (nervous) system down overall, leaving the signalling needed for rebuilding to go on with less background noise.

It might be worth investigating teaching people techniques that relax their minds with meditation and from head to toe with something like guided relaxation, whilst their limbs are repairing. It's sometimes called guided relaxation.

That would be good for everyone, to relieve stress and aid healing. Experiments shouldn't be too hard to set up in hospital and with follow through in outpatient clinics. Something like this might prevent those who have this effect from getting to this stage in the first place.

I wish Mr. Tunio a speedy recovery.