Suck The Fat Outta Me With That Thing, Doc. I Have My Teenaged Years Ahead.

MayorBob.

Posted to SciTech on Sat Dec 09, 2006 at 11:41:51 AM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.

Brooke Bates of Pflugerville, Texas had weight issues. She weighed 180 pounds by age 11 and had ballooned to 220 pounds a year later.  She tried her darnedest to lose the weight: low carb diets, Weight Watchers, and Richard Simmons Deal-A-Meal, to name a few - all without success.  Then she found a weight program that worked, that removed pounds, and made her "about as happy as a little girl can be" in the words of her father, Joey Bates.  But, if Brooke and her father and mother are happy with the program, that doesn't mean that many other people are.  You see, Brooke literally had the excess pounds sucked out of her by liposuction.  That's a procedure the medical community says shouldn't be used for weight control and certainly isn't meant for young people.

When Brooke's story was reported in People and on TV, the reaction of people like Dr. Zachary Gerut was unequivocal.  Not only is liposuction "not a treatment for obesity" he likened it to: "cutting out a piece of skin for psoriasis. The problem is still there. The person is going to get psoriasis everywhere else."  Bottom line, it's for body sculpting, not weight reduction -- even the FDA says so.  And, although liposuction has become the top cosmetic surgery procedure in the US with 324,000 operations performed in 2004, it is still not widely performed on those under the age of 18 (a total of 3,084 procedures in 2004).  Rarer still is seeing it used on someone as young as 12.  According to Dr. Peter Fodor, a past president of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, there is almost no "experience with people who are 12, with that kind of surgery" cautioning "metabolically, her whole system is still growing."  That, plus there is always the possibility of complications coming from such a procedure.

So, what kind of plastic surgeon would perform liposuction on a 12-year-old?  That would be a plastic surgeon like Dr. Robert Ersek, who describes himself as "the biggest fat sucker in Texas."  He's also a man who seems to be unabashedly proud of what he does for mankind with a liposuction machine.  The doctor said he was initially opposed to using liposuction on Brooke but finally consented when he learned about her high blood pressure.  This reasoning didn't seem too compelling to some people in the fat acceptance community, however.

Ersek believes the bottom line answer on whether it was right to do it to Brooke being her current condition.  She's down to 155 pounds and, according to her parents, her self-esteem has gone through the roof.  No matter how Brooke feels about herself or the folksy charms of Dr. Ersek, many in the medical community are still troubled by this incident.  Dr. Ron Rohrich, past president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, says "teenage cosmetic surgery is very limited in this country -- especially liposuction -- to unusual circumstances."  Dr. Rohrich also notes: "I need to run and eat less to lose weight. Why would it be different for a kid?"