Onus

Today’s word is onus, which is a noun that means:

1. a difficult or disagreeable obligation, task, burden, etc.;

2. burden of proof;

3. blame or responsibility.

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As I watched a television special about a young woman who eventually died after receiving gastric bypass surgery to help her lose some of the 850 pounds on her body, I began to wonder about the treatment she could have received under the umbrella of a national health care plan. Will the onus to reduce her body to a heathy weight ever be transferred from the individual to the government, and if the government did force an individual to lose weight, how would the cost versus benefit ratio for the person’s treatment be determined?

I was very surprised and saddened when the woman died, unexpectedly, after the surgery, because I expected a wonderfully happy ending with a slender, totally different woman by the end of the show, but even before the story’s sad scenes were televised, I was already questioning why this woman needed an operation in the first place.

Since the bypass was meant to restrict the calories that were absorbed into her body, why couldn’t she instead have been admitted for a period of time into a hospital where the quantities and types of food that she consumed were controlled; she could have simultaneously benefited from extensive counseling about why she felt the need to overeat in the extreme. It was apparent, but never discussed in the documentary, that someone was facilitating her obesity, and obtaining the large quanitities of fattening food for her, because she was not ambulatory and had been bedridden for several years prior to being admitted into the hospital for her procedure, but wasn’t the medical profession also responsible to seek the best solution instead of the quickest resolution to an illness that may have been more parts pertaining to a mental condition than her body’s slow metabolism. Health care on a government’s budget will always be controlled by the costs to provide the medical treatments, and in a society where patience is old-fashioned and immediate results are demanded in a time-crunched world, surgery with quick results will always win out over slow, steady, weight loss via a reduction in caloric intake and counseling, but will focusing on time and cost always be the best solution when the problem is morbid obesity?

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