Bariatrics As A Discourse Community Analysis

Ashley Pirone

English Writing 3306

Professor Victoria Papa

September 25, 2015

Unit 1

APA

Bariatrics as a Discourse Community

Bariatrics is the branch of medicine that focuses on the causes, prevention, and treatment of obesity. Bariatric surgery is a specific discourse community connecting individuals through mutual interests, shared knowledge, and expertise of treating obese populations. The field of bariatrics is a discourse community with several purposes. It encourages innovative surgical and nonsurgical solutions in obesity care. It formulates hypotheses and develops and conducts experimental designs to test the hypotheses’ reliability and validity. Furthermore, it aims to stimulate discussion about its findings. Scientists,

In general, a scientific format is divided into sections that consists of: introduction, heading, subheadings, methods, results, discussion, acknowledgments, future direction, and a citations page. In particular, Smith’s “Bariatric Surgery for the Treatment of Morbid Obesity” (year) has subheadings to help the reader navigate and reference the material. White space creates visual breaks in the text to help the audience process the information and prevents them from losing their place in the text. These aspects of the scientific method speak to the value of the discourse community because they show that people in this field appreciate and expect medical information to be presented in a clear-cut, direct, and precise manner. In addition, the use of medical jargon shows that the collections audience is very exclusive to those who have a scientific background. One of the articles titled, “The Impacts of Childhood and Adolescent Obesity on Quality of Life,” uses medical terminology such as OSA, which stands for Obstructive Sleep Apnea, SCFE, which is Slipped Capital Femoral Ephysis, or GERD, which stands for Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (p. #2). Without having a science background, the language used in articles like the one mentioned above would be hard to

The six articles that appear in this issue of Journal of Obesity and Bariatrics uphold that value by using visual aids such as tables and statistical figures. For example, author Yishai Levy (2015) argues that bariatric surgery is a potential cure for Type II Diabetes (pg. 1). First, Levy supports this claim by using three tables of data, which she uses to demonstrate the effectiveness of bariatric surgery on aspects of the body like glucose homeostasis, blood tests, and inflammatory markers, (p. #3). She also uses statistical figures such as, “50% improvement in liver enzymes,” and “46% change in excess weight loss” and using such data, she adds more authority to her claim through the power of numbers (p. #3). The use of tables can help the audience better understand the results of the study and allows the author to present the results of her findings in a clear and concise manner. One thing to consider is that replication is important in natural sciences such as Bariatrics, and by providing numbers, the author makes it important to replicate her findings to determine the reliability and validity of her