Just Remove It: When the Body Becomes a Machine
What a conversation about kidney stones and gallbladder surgery reveals about our modern health culture.
It is astonishing how easily modern conversations about the body drift toward removing parts of it. I’ve heard people casually recount the removal of their wisdom teeth as if it were a badge of honour, but a recent discussion about kidney stones and gallbladder surgery made that cultural shift impossible to ignore.
What struck me most was not the people themselves, but the assumptions behind the exchange.
When confusion about the body becomes normal
It’s not the first time, but I had a conversation that left me once again thinking about how confused many people are about their own bodies.
via Public Domain Image Archive / Internet Archive / Library of Congress
Two people were describing their experience with urinary stones.
They spoke about the pain.
One said it felt comparable to labour contractions.
The other said a friend who had both been shot in the hand and passed stones claimed the stones were worse.
Kidney stones are widely recognised as one of the most painful experiences a person can have.
Naturally I asked what causes them.
One woman said her doctor told her it was because she consumed too much cheese.
Knowing her somewhat, I asked if she really ate that much cheese.
She admitted she didn’t eat much traditional cheese compared with the average person in France, but that she often used industrial pre-grated cheese.
Still, something didn’t quite add up.
After a bit more conversation she casually mentioned that she also eats industrial ice-cream every single day.
I couldn’t help noticing the difference between what we might call traditional foods, made from whole ingredients in an artisanal way and their heavily processed, industrial counterparts.
It is one thing to eat artisanal cheese. Or even occasionally indulge in ice-cream or gelato made from milk, cream, eggs and sugar. It is quite another to religiously consume industrial formulations filled with stabilisers, syrups and processed ingredients every single day.
Modern ultra-processed foods place a very different metabolic burden on the body.
I explored the role of additives and flavour engineering in modern food systems in more detail in my reflection on why real food matters and why many people choose to avoid additives and “natural flavours.”
At that point the picture became a little clearer.
Ultra-processed foods, high sugar intake, metabolic stress and dehydration are all known contributors to kidney stone formation. But somehow the story had been simplified down to “too much cheese“.
The foods being described were not traditional, artisanal cheeses or occasional desserts, but industrial formulations consumed daily. In modern diets, that difference matters.
Indulgence, enjoyed occasionally within an otherwise balanced approach, is rarely the problem. The issue arises when low-quality foods become routine.
What struck me even more was what happened next.
A man in the conversation confidently explained that these problems could be solved by removing the gallbladder.
When I expressed surprise at the idea of casually removing an organ, he reassured me that “we don’t need it anyway.”
Kidney Stones vs Gallstones: A Common Misunderstanding
The suggestion itself was surprising, but the more I reflected on the exchange, the more the underlying confusion stood out.
Kidney stones and gallstones are often confused in everyday conversation, yet they form in entirely different organs and arise from different biological processes. Kidney stones develop in the kidneys and may travel through the urinary tract, while gallstones form in the gallbladder as part of the digestive system.
Removing the gallbladder has no effect on kidney stones, yet in the conversation they were spoken about as if they were interchangeable.
I can appreciate the confusion. The body is a complex system, and most of us are never really taught how it works. In busy modern lives it becomes easier to outsource these questions to “professionals” than to cultivate an interest in understanding the body ourselves.
In that sense, the exchange revealed how detached many people have become from the basic workings of their own bodies.
Organs become optional.
Symptoms become disconnected from causes.
Surgical solutions appear before lifestyle questions are even considered.
When Surgery Replaces Lifestyle
Of course there are situations where surgery is necessary and lifesaving. Modern medicine has saved countless lives, despite certain transgressions.
Nevertheless it is still remarkable how easily the idea of removing a body part is now discussed as if it were a trivial adjustment.
All that rather than asking what changes in lifestyle might support the functioning of this extraordinary body we find ourselves in.
The human body is an extraordinarily complex system that spent nine months assembling itself inside our mothers with astonishing precision.
Yet in everyday conversations we casually speak about removing organs we supposedly “don’t need” without even understanding what they do.
When the Body Starts to Be Treated Like a Machine
More and more, when I speak with certain people in everyday settings, it becomes clear how much of a cultural shift has taken place.
The body is increasingly treated as something that can be flippantly modified, repaired or removed piece by piece rather than understood and revered as a whole, living system.
Instead of asking how to support the body holistically, many people now assume that if something goes wrong, a technician will simply modify or remove the part and life will improve, or continue as before.
The reality is that yes, parts of the body can be removed and we can survive.
But survival is not the same as optimal functioning.
Under what conditions will that life continue?
Because it is very unlikely to be exactly the same as before.
In many cases, people that have undergone surgery discover that their digestion, metabolism or overall resilience changes, and they end up needing to modify their lifestyle after all.
What’s more, this mindset feels like preparation for something larger.
When we begin to see the body as a collection of replaceable parts rather than a living system, it becomes much easier to imagine redesigning it entirely.
It is the philosophical groundwork for transhumanism. The idea that human biology should be engineered, upgraded or replaced begins with this assumption.
Relearning How to Support the Body
The body was never meant to be treated as a machine with parts we can replace at a whim.
It is an integrated system. And when one piece is removed, the whole system has to reorganise around that absence.
This way of thinking reflects a deeper cultural shift. The body is no longer approached as something to understand and live within, but as something to correct, modify, or replace.
I explored another dimension of this mindset in my reflection on the modern narrative of being “born in the wrong body.”
Despite what the cult of scientism often suggests, the human body is a sacred vessel for life. We would serve both it and ourselves far better by learning to understand it. With the resources available to us today, there is little excuse for outsourcing that responsibility entirely to others.
Our body is something to be understood, supported, and lived within.
Something to be respected, cared for, and revitalised in harmony with nature.
The more we learn about the body, the harder it becomes to see it as a machine made of replaceable parts.
Perhaps the real question is not which organs we can remove and still survive, but how we can better understand and support the body we already inhabit.
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