Milord Actually, gastric bypass is a severe physical limitation:
e.g. you literally are limited in the amount you can eat.
the amount that you can eat leads to some other funny limitations, e.g. the patient generally speaking is required to drink and eat time separated, as the stomach is to small to accomodate both at the same.
the patient is required to take supplementals for the rest of their life (e.g. which in Austria the social insurance is not paying for), as the body is modified in a way that it cannot acquire all necessary nutrients in the necessary amounts from the food.
to summarize, you are literally forced physically to a special diet for the rest of your life, that's why e.g. in Austria, the surgery is only done as the ultima ratio, when at least 2-3 serious other documented therapies have failed. As in medically conducted therapies, not your private diet. And only if a treating external doctor recommends the patient for the procedure, if not they hospital will not even give an appointment.
actually, the hospital literally require a psychatrical evalution if there is even a hint that the patient might be not stable enough, and they require the patient to keep to the new, slightly monotonous diet, for a month to see if they are stubborn enough to keep up with the program.
Anyway, IMHO, if there is a procedure that fits the description of medicine being "doing bodily harm with a legal licence to do so", none comes to my mind.
But then it is literally used (at least here in Austria) for cases where medicine is helpless, patients with eating disorders, who literally eat themselves to death, literally eat so long till they overstretched their stomach and are acutely sick.
In that situation, one can argue, is limiting their stomach to smaller portions, so that they get sick faster, and perhaps learn something from being more often sick helping? Is damaging their ingestion system so that it is less efficient, actually helping them?
But please do not try to make light of (especially) this procedure, it's brutal, just listening in on the pre-pretreatment consultation (as the allowed companion) made be blanch.
