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I think the article and all the comments about how "medical science has proven that the gall bladder is nearly useless" are dangerous nonsense. I'm not claiming
by SiVal 12y ago
I think the article and all the comments about how "medical science has proven that the gall bladder is nearly useless" are dangerous nonsense. I'm not claiming you should not remove a gallbladder when necessary, just that it is not useless.
I also had my gallbladder out, which left me unable to eat a meal without suffering extreme diarrhea about 20 minutes later. I found a good gastroenterologist and described my symptoms, and he recognized them immediately. Surprisingly common, he said. He said that the gallbladder served as a reservoir of bile acids produced by the liver, holding them in reserve until needed to help digest fats. A "bladder" for "gall". Unfortunately, bile acids can be irritating to the intestines, so if the gall bladder isn't available to catch it, it will drip into the intestines when there is no fat for it to work on, causing a chronic bowel irritation in many people that can result in diarrhea.
After many gallbladder surgeries, the tubes carrying the bile from the liver to the GI tract will stretch a bit and recreate a bit of the reservoir function of the "nearly useless" gallbladder, but this doesn't happen in everyone. I was not so lucky.
Without hesitation, he prescribed Cholestyramine powder (I get a generic version), which is a "bile acid sequestrant", which is a resin that encapsulates bile in the intestines. It changed my life in one dose. Problem instantly vanished. I was once again able to both leave the house AND eat on the same day. Just one problem: it was not a cure. It just sequestered some of the bile acid that my missing gallbladder used to sequester. If I missed even a single day, the diarrhea would return with a vengeance the following day unless I fasted all day.
Like many other people, I'm lucky to have this $150/month medicine, which gave me my life back, but I'll have to take it every day for the rest of my life, never missing a day, because I need it to compensate for the lost gallbladder--you know, the one that medical science has proven to be nearly useless.
- chdir 12y agoI'm sorry to hear about the outcome. Did your Doctor mention what percentage of people share the same problem as you? If the percentage is small, isn't that the case with most medical procedures & medicines i.e. risk of side effects ? My understanding is that gall bladder removal has been perfected over a long time span and it's considered safe far a very high percentage of patients.
- SiVal 12y agoThe surgeon made a comment about roughly 3% of people having side effects, but I'll have to say that I'm skeptical. The way he said it made me think he was just repeating a line he'd heard years ago and never questioned. Certainly, he never knew how I ended up and made no effort to find out. His interest was in the surgery itself, not the eventual consequences of the lack of a gall bladder. The gastroenterologist, on the other hand, seemed to imply that problems were a lot more common than 3%, but I was too busy telling him about my problems to even ask about statistics. And then, after surgery, far more than 3% of others I've spoken to have had various problems, BUT it's still clearly a minority. So, in all of these three "data sources" of mine, I'm guessing about tone of voice, getting an impression, and so on--not very reliable statistically, I'm afraid, but I'm trying to be both honest and somewhat detailed here in case it proves useful to someone. I think your understanding is correct that 1) the removal (meaning process of extraction) has been essentially perfected, and 2) that it is considered safe for a (very?) high percentage of patients. It also seems to me that if you are going through the agony of gallstones, you'd do better to live without a gallbladder than to live with gallstones. What I object to is the BBC putting an article out there that basically claims that science has proven that the gallbladder has no useful function and that the only risk in removing it is the risk of the actual cutting itself. Nonsense. Just being a "bladder for gall" was making it possible for me to work outside the home, go on business trips, vacations, etc.--a very useful function whose loss I have to compensate for with daily medication.
- thirsteh 12y agoI appreciate you telling your story, and apologize for insinuating that it was a useless organ rather than an organ that you can live fine without in most cases.
- SiVal 12y agoYeah, that statement I agree with. And no apology necessary (but +1 to you for it anyway), because it wasn't an issue of etiquette but of factual correctness. And not just "someone is wrong on the Internet." This one matters, because if someone with a somewhat gravelly gall bladder but no history of gallstones (picked up by ultrasound while looking at something else) decides to go ahead and have it removed based on the assumption that it literally does nothing except put you at risk of gallstones and can be removed with no risk other than the very minor cutting, he might end up like me, and I'm hoping to prevent a few cases of that. I'm also hoping to put something out there for people who end up like me to find via Google, so they can try Cholestyramine. Apparently it doesn't help some people, but it was miraculous for me.