This week, the media reported that “obese NHS patients are being given a gastric weight loss balloon”.
The balloon is placed inside a capsule and swallowed, then filled with water through a thin tube during a 15-minute consultation. An X-ray is conducted to confirm that it is in the correct position in the stomach and filled with water. After four months, a time-activated release valve opens, which allows the water-filled balloon to empty and pass through the gastrointestinal tract.
Two NHS patients have received this treatment at Musgrove Park Hospital. All the hype suggests it’s risk-free and a simple procedure, but can anything go wrong?
NICE says that the “evidence on the safety of the swallowable gastric balloon capsule for weight loss shows infrequent but potentially serious adverse events”. Yet the Guardian and the BBC made no mention of the problems
NICE reports: “The evidence of efficacy is adequate to support the use of this procedure provided that special arrangements are in place for clinical governance, consent and audit.”
Special arrangements mean “there are uncertainties about whether a procedure is safe or effective. NICE also recommend special arrangements if risks of serious harm are known”. Hmm, we didn’t see that either in the news.
The BBC trots out a consultant who says the pill offers “meaningful weight loss”. But no mention of the possible harms.
NICE evidence was updated in April 2020, including a meta-analysis, eight case series, and one case report.
The review included six studies, which were all prospective cohort studies – none were randomised. The meta-analysis reports total body weight loss after treatment (four to six months) of 12.8% (95% CI 11.6 to 13.9). Only two studies of 191 patients reported 12 months of weight loss of 10.9% (95% CI 5.0 to 16.9). Both these effects showed high study heterogeneity and should not have been pooled methodologically.
Serious complications occurred in about one in 200 patients and included gastric perforation and small bowel obstructions. Symptoms such as abdominal pain and nausea or vomiting were frequently reported and required management with medication.
The Daily Mail did make its readers aware of some of the problems:
Some had side-effects – 2.9% couldn’t tolerate it and needed it removed with an endoscope, but the authors said “serious adverse events were very rare”: these included three cases of small bowel obstruction, and one patient had a perforated stomach, all requiring surgery.
Readers of Trust the Evidence will be aware of our Deadly Device series on breast implants, the Essure Implant and transvaginal mesh, amongst others.
As it turns out, gastric balloon insertion has been around for some time as a strategy for managing weight loss. In June 2018, the FDA alerted healthcare providers about five more deaths associated with the use of liquid-filled intragastric balloon devices for obesity. The FDA said it was “carefully tracking adverse events, including a total of 12 deaths over the past two years, that have been reported in patients with two balloon devices used to treat obesity”.
These new capsule balloons avoid the surgery associated with previous devices, and no deaths have been reported.
We have previously written about ‘The Inevitable Harms of Weight Loss Drugs‘, whose history tells us it’s all too predictable. In the absence of randomised trials, a lack of long-term safety data beyond 12 months and serious adverse events in the observational data, we again think it may be all too predictable. However, without journalism criticising the evidence, the public might think balloons are the latest risk-free answer to their dietary woes.
Prof. Carl Heneghan is the Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Dr. Tom Jefferson is an epidemiologist based in Rome who works with Professor Heneghan on the Cochrane Collaboration. This article was first published on their Substack, Trust The Evidence, which you can subscribe to here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Fancy that the BBC shilling for big pharma blob.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/will-disease-x-leaked-2025/5847210
“At this point, it’s quite clear that “biosecurity” is the chosen means by which the globalist cabal intends to seize power over the world. The WHO is working on securing sole power over pandemic response globally through its international pandemic treaty which, if implemented, will eradicate the sovereignty of all member nations.
The WHO’s pandemic treaty is the gateway to a global, top-down totalitarian regime, a one world government. Ultimately, the WHO intends to dictate all health care. But to secure that power, they will need more pandemics. COVID-19 alone was not enough to get everyone onboard with a centralized pandemic response unit, and they probably knew that from the start.
So, the reason we can be sure there will be additional pandemics, whether manufactured using either fear and hype alone or an actual bioweapon created for this very purpose, is because the takeover plan, aka The Great Reset, is based on the premise that we need global biosecurity surveillance and centralized response.
Biosecurity, in turn, is the justification for an international vaccine passport, which the G20 has signed on to, and that passport will also be your digital identification. That digital ID, then, will be tied to your social credit score, personal carbon footprint tracker, medical records, educational records, work records, social media presence, purchase records, your bank accounts and a programmable central bank digital currency (CBDC).
Once all these pieces are fully connected, you’ll be in a digital prison, and the ruling cabal — whether officially a one world government by then or not — will have total control over your life from cradle to grave.”
No offence to Drs Heneghan and Jeffries for interrupting this thread.
In terms of weight loss I think it has to come from a position of self-control because obviously for it to be meaningful and beneficial to health it has to be something that can be sustained ideally for life. Lots of people get a gym membership for a few months but then get bored with it. You have to find a discipline where even if you had twenty lifetimes you wouldn’t be able to indulge it enough. Then you appetites will start to become regulated. Life is short and art is long as they say so it is worth the journey of discovery to find a transcendent passion.
Self control is not allowed in the new order.
Your health is the responsibility of the authorities.
Didn’t you know the easy way to health and fitness is by popping pills? – according to Pfizer at least.
After becoming an expert in weight gain, I now consider myself an expert in weight loss. Having gone from 110kg to 90 in the last two years. I’ve yoyo dieted in the past failing to sustain weight loss. And having an engineering mind grounded in proper physics, for too long I was beguiled by calorie counting. While it’s true the law of thermodynamics is inviolable and we get fat because of too many calories in and two few out, and while it is also true, it was only ever my elbow bending to my cake hole and putting the calories in there, this nevertheless ignores the processes and cycles that generate cravings that will inevitably lead to failure.
TBH losing weight this time and sustaining and sustaining it has been easy (now I am where I am – which I will explain below) because I now have and understanding of how the body works in relation to food an nutrition, much of it curtesy of YouTube and Dr Sten Ekberg, who has produced a brilliant set of videos which paint a very clear picture of how the body actually works to supply nutrition and energy.
The bad news. I’ve given up sugar and alcohol completely. Neither of which I expected I would be able to sustain. But actually having done this has resulted in some deep seated realisations about how the brain works in relation to food such that now staying away from both these vices has become easier than I expected. I’ve also massively reduced my carbohydrate intake. The realisations this has led to has been profound.
But I have an admission to make. I would not have succeeded in any of this if I had not had a profound enough health scare (I suspected cancer) such that I decided I would, for at least 6 months do the radical zero sugar, starve the (suspected) cancer of sugar diet (which also, since there is so much sugar in alcoholic drinks and even for near pure spirits the body converts alcohol to sugar). So I was mentally prepared to go through some barriers I might not have got through were it not for fear of dying.
Got a cure for Cheese n Onion crisps?
PS I’m not overweight, but I do get “crisp cravings.”
Quite right
I’m not in need of losing weight but if I were I don’t think I’d be wanting that thing in me. Being hugely fat is probably not good for most people but I think I’d rather the “public health” industry stopped trying to influence people’s lifestyle choices. Actually I would quite like the “public health” industry to disappear entirely.
Indeed, “public health” has well and truly jumped the shark long ago.
Certainly with regard to “covid” the effect on the health of the public has been net negative.
Honestly the solution to most of this is very simple or should but it can’t be fully understood without looking at the history of the refined sugar industry. Not just its own machinations but the bent that it put upon nutritional science especially from the 1950s in terms of the role of carbohydrates in ther diet. The British and American diets are perhaps the worst in this regard. Most people think that carbohydrates should form the most substantial part of a meal. Of course their cheapness is a factor too and they work well as ballast for an empty stomach and for people involved in heavy manual labour. But in my experience processed carbohydrates tend to have all sorts of deleterious effects. Also most people think that eating fat makes you fat and this is a big problem.
Yep excessive carbohydrate consumption is responsible for much of the ill’s people face today. It results in high blood sugar, which the body can’t cope with, which leads over time to insulin resistance and metabolic disease, which in turn are responsible for a whopping 95% of the ailments people get treatment for. I recommend 1) When you see a food that is primarily carbohydrate, put a big visual equals sign next to it, and visualise a pile of sugar. Because that is what the body very quickly turns it into, and with unnerving efficiency. 2) When you see a pint of beer, transform that also in your minds eye, into a small loaf of bread. So yes, then another equals sign and a pile of sugar. Beer is in many respects akin to liquid bread. Albeit bread doesn’t lead you to feeling so enjoyably drunk.
GB News jab pushers:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzYimCWuuMs
There are presenters and guests on GB News who are “jab pushers”, and there are presenters and guests on GB News who are completely opposed to pushing the jabs, and there are presenters and guests on GB News who are completely opposed to the jabs. It’s a free speech channel, not an echo chamber.
The deeper issue is the parting of the ways. If someone on television tells you something then it is likely to be either nonsense or poison. You only have so long to learn this lesson. The Australian aboriginies started talking about it in 2018. How it would start with a run on toilet paper in the supermarkets. I’m sure we all remember that dismal episode. It really was with the toilet paper and the attitude towards it that the new spirit was born. We don’t care about toilet paper. I am happy to use the same old rag for years or even more primitive methods. I think it is important to mediate on that time in early 2020 and just to understand the nature of the schism.
Toilet paper is actually one of the least efficient methods of washing your anus for several reasion. First of all it is dry and so relies upon absorption. Secondly it tends to pick up some faces but then spread feacl matter around the backside region. It can break leaving parts of itself within the crack which can linger for an indefinite time. It depends on front to back or back to front action. Obviously you don’t want to be depositing fecal matter into the vagina. It really isn’t the best method to begin with.
If you ever run out a handstand in the shower is a better and more economic alternative.
Netherlands and Germany are the latest countries to announce they’ve stopped/paused funding terrorism and are no longer giving money to Jihadist support and training organization, UNWRA. That’s 9 countries so far and hopefully more will follow.
https://twitter.com/HillelNeuer/status/1751337730494054470
https://expose-news.com/2024/01/26/this-is-the-end/
Dr Vernon Coleman giving a heartfelt goodbye. He is ending his writing and the videos in order to look after his wife who is recovering from cancer.
His story of the last four years makes for painful reading.
I am grateful to Dr Coleman because he was one of the first sensible people I found who confirmed my early suspicions re the Scamdemic.
Best wishes and thank you Dr Coleman to you and your wife. A brave man. A brave team.
God bless.