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Medical Tourism and Bariatric Surgery: More Moral Challenges

(Levenson 2007). This does not in any way minimize the importance of psychiatric comorbidity in assessing whether an individual should receive bariatric surgery; my intention is rather to point out, again, that this is not a challenge unique to a surgery intended to combat obesity. While Professor Hofmann begins his article with a recitation of the major health consequences and expenses of obesity, his first few ethical questions portray those seeking bariatric surgery as somewhat hapless victims of a social problem, rather than as individuals seeking medical care. While it is true that bariatric surgery raises unique challenges for practitioners, patients, and society as a whole, these challenges are better summarized by Professor Hofmann’s other questions about the effects this will have on social order, medicalization, and the importance of endpoints, among other concerns. But social problems should not be conflated with individual problems. Just because a person is obese and subject to societal pressure does not make him or her any more or less able to give consent and to act in a voluntary fashion.