Alimentary tract disorders

[bsugar888]

Hello all I am doing the objective questions for wednesday lecture. And one of the objectives states Describe how alimentary tract disorders can impact individuals, families, and populations. I know the alimentary tract is from the mouth to the orifice...so is the questions asking for things sure as gerd, gastric cancer, peptic ulcers, gastric by pass,and intestional obstructions????............I am just asking if I'm on the right track...........And if these persons have a disorder as this it would effect the families as well....and with gastric by pass....Populations tend to look down on heavy individuals, and since gactric by pass surgery their eating is altered.....am I correct.

[Daytonite, BSN, RN]

i can think of some things with relation to alimentary track disorders

• impacting individuals - think about what having a disease like irritable bowel syndrome or gerd has on people. it's no fun planning your life around where the closest bathroom is going to be because you have constant diarrhea or can only go to restaurants and order food that isn't going to cause a flair up of your indigestion
  
• families - if someone has a family member who has a disease in it's late state, such as anorexia, they have to be constantly watching and caring for the person. if a family member has something like crohn's disease or cancer the family is going to be transporting the person to a lot of doctors appointments, treatments and tests since many things are done on an outpatient basis now. that takes a toll on the family. i, myself, have weeks where i have 4 or 5 appointments during the week (this is one of them) and i have to plan my time carefully.
  
• populations - makes me think about things like outbreaks of bacterial infections. there was a fast food chain that was linked to a couple of people dying due to bacteria in their burgers because they weren't being cooked long enough. didn't taco bell get bad publicity a year or two ago because of some kind of contamination in the lettuce they were using? then there was a fresh spinach contamination recently in the stores, at least out here in the west. you hear about food recalls, particularly ground beef, every once in a while because of a bacterial contamination which would cause a disease outbreak in the general population. did you know that prior to the invention of pasteurization and canning that food poisoning was one of the top causes of death when they first started compiling statistics way back when?
  

i've had gastric bypass surgery. did people look down on me when i weighed almost 400 pounds? probably. i couldn't really tell you because at that weight there really wasn't much i could do out in the general public. and when i did go out i was so focused on getting through what had to be done that i didn't have time to notice what people around me were looking at or imagining. what i can tell you is that i consider it life saving and i feel so-o-o-o normal now which is all i ever wanted and couldn't achieve before. i can eat anything, including every goodie out there, but i really don't have the urge to do that anymore. my biggest food vice these days as the summer approaches is diet popsicles and diet sorbets. i would really like to see some entrepreneur open up a fast food drive through that serves small portions and every kind of diet drink there is, not just diet coke or diet pepsi. i end up having to throw away more than half of the regular food portions from most fast food places now as the portion sizes, even on the kids meals, are too big. i watch the carl's jr commercials out here and, i swear, there is no way anyone could open their mouth wide enough to take a full bite out of one of their burgers!

did anyone hear on last week's 60 minutes that they are studying the finding that the roux-en-y gastric bypass surgery may cure type ii diabetes? i know mine went away. if that turns out to be true, it will be a big medical breakthrough since type ii diabetes is running rampant in the obese population these days.