arnuxii

I noticed this watching videos on youtube made by people who have VSG.
They have a lot of trouble articulating.
They stumble over their words, can't remember what they are saying, can't think what they should say.
The effect is obvious so I am surprised nobody picked up on it.
The wiki says something about the ghrelin stimulating nerve growth in the hippocampus.
Since anti-depressants also affect nerve growth it might be possible to counter the lack of ghrelin by taking anti-depressants.
I haven't had VSG yet so I am just observing.

The fact that we do not have single-payer is what causes this; the loop between the billers (hospitals, mostly) and insurers causes rates to soar. The fact that for the most part, insurance "just handles it" causes most of us to not notice -- until the first time you need medical care when you're uninsured. Then all of a sudden, a relatively routine medical treatment can bankrupt you (medical costs are still the number one cause of personal bankruptcy, and will be until we fix our crazy patchwork of for-profit, insurance-based medicine). And all of this is because all of the billing and payment goes through a web of middlemen, each extracting their cut.
The same situation can be seen in all industries where there is "mandatory" (or effectively mandatory) insurance. Just look at how expensive it is to get bodywork done on your car; this is the same situation where most people never get the sticker shock because if they're insured, insurance "just handles it." Thus there is no popular anger, and no consumer search for competition forcing the prices down (you know, how capitalism is supposed to work, when the politicians watching the henhouse aren't bought and sold by the very people they're regulating). Did you notice that one of the parts of the health care reform law that the insurance companies fought so very hard (and very successfully) to keep out was the simple provision that revoked their anti-trust exemption? In theory, why should they get this exemption -- if we're going to have anti-trust laws, everyone should be governed by them, right? It's only fair play. And yet, for some reason, insurers are allowed to monopolize local markets, with the predictable result that there are very frequently only one or two (colluding) insurers in any given market, and consumers have no real choices... no way to hop to a different insurer when the extortion of Aetna or Cigna or BCBS gets too horrible (of course, the insurers have also colluded to make changing insurance outside of a job change very difficult... they basically game the system any way they can).
And if people could see just how much potential salary they're giving up, just so their employers can pay their outrageous insurance premiums, there'd be a revolution. I've seen estimates that say that up to 20-40% of the cost of keeping an employee is benefits, with most of that being health insurance premiums. Just think what you could do with another 20% of your salary in your pocket...
Of course, the moral problem with health insurance is that we're effectively making it unavailable to the poor and uninsured (often the same group) with our broken system. Until we stop screaming "socialism! socialism!" and running away whenever someone mentions single-payer medicine, this will just keep getting worse. Single-payer systems aren't perfect by any means, but they are more humane and a LOT more affordable (both to the individual and to the nation) than our current for-greed system.
And before someone starts talking about the poor, harassed doctors, that's a red herring. Most of the money in our scam-based system does NOT go to the doctor; most of the money goes to CEO's and stock shareholders in whatever corporations manage to squeeze out the most competition. The doctors these days, after paying off the ridiculous graft malpractice insurance rates, are lucky to get by. Have you noticed how private practices for NON-lucrative specialties (lucrative: plastic surgery, weight loss surgery; non-lucrative: pediatrics) are disappearing? That's why; doctors are NOT getting rich off our current system. If they were, we'd have more medical school graduates and fewer business school graduates; instead, we're getting frighteningly near to a serious "doctor shortage" in the US. No, the only people getting rich are the execs and shareholders of Aetna, Blue Cross, Cigna, and so on.
Yes, OP, the system is broken and disgusting, and anybody who's paying attention SHOULD be feeling the same anger you felt when they see just how much of a scam it is, especially when you consider the fact that people are dying because of it.