to change the settings, and try to see if we can affect the appetite drive these patients have. larry: what have you learned so far? well, we ve learned in the first few series, the first series we ve done, that the procedure can be done safely. we ve learned that we don t think we re having side effects. and that we can affect the urge to eat, decrease the urge. we re looking at it being well tolerated. but the real the jury s still out, larry, we don t have all the results yet. we re now working on trying to refine the settings to see if we can get the weight loss that we and the patients desire. larry: why only very obese people? well, this is the way the study was set up. it s patients who have failed all medical diets, patients who have failed gastric or stomach bypass surgery, patients who have undergone psychiatric evaluation. and again, their life expectancy is significantly reduced if they
broke the camel s back that caused him to be kicked out of the class. was he just being disruptive to your teaching and the students or did you feel in any way that this guy was becoming a threat? he was a threat. he actually wrote something on the quiz that said mayhem fest and wrote it in big, bold capital letters. mayhem? mayhem fest. and then put three exclamation points, drew random scribblings, like pictures. violent pictures? not really. just random stuff. but the mayhem fest got me concerned. concerned enough to get the school to actually kick loughner out of the class. he had to be physically removed by a campus police officer and dean. that led to a meeting in which loughner was excluded from the campus until and unless he got psychiatric evaluation. the teachers and students were scared of the guy.