When Illness Becomes Normal — Metabolic Breakdown, Pseudoscience, and the Cost of Calling Pathology Progress
Ask a surgeon why the gallbladder came out, and the answer arrives fast, almost cheerful: you don’t really need it. That’s true in the narrow sense that a person can live, eat, and digest fat well enough without one. It’s also one of the most quietly revealing sentences in modern medicine. Cholecystectomy — removal of the gallbladder — is now among the most common abdominal operations performed in the country doing the most of them, and the organ is coming out almost always because of gallstones that track, closely, with obesity and insulin resistance. Nobody is treating a design flaw in the gallbladder. They are treating the downstream damage of a metabolic environment the organ was never built to survive, and calling the removal a fix rather than a receipt. …
