Paper short abstract:

This ethnography on bariatric surgery multidisciplinary staff meetings will deconstruct the admission pragmatics, revealing the ontologies on obesity and how evidence-based medicine jointly with social and moral criteria enters into play in the triage of the out-bonds bodies to be operated

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents preliminary results of a broader research currently taking place at the University Public Hospital of Ambroise Paré (Boulogne, Parisian region, France) on bariatric surgery. This research seeks to explain the way obesity is constructed in lay and expert knowledge and how obesity is enacted in clinical settings. It also aims to understand how people whose body is not only out of bounds but also sources of physical and social suffering link in their daily life nutritional norms and eating practices. Drawing from the ethnographical data produced from June 2013 on the multidisciplinary meetings in which hospital staff decides who can be operated or not, I will do a deconstruction analysis of the admission pragmatics to obesity surgery. This analysis will reveal the coexistence of a diversity of ontologies on morbid obesity, on which depend both the medical treatment and the patient-family-professionals relations. By which criteria are selected the candidates willing a bariatric surgery? At what extend do clinical practices rest on the so-called "evidenced-based research" in medicine? How criteria on the social conditions of life are taken into consideration in the description of the profile and bio-history of the "cases" discussed in these meetings? How moral judgments on the habits and the personality of the candidates enter into play in the selection of the operable patients and the decision on the type of surgery?