When the risk increases and regular methods to lose or manage weight becomes unsupportive, doctors suggest for bariatric surgery.
It should be clearly understood and realized that it takes significant time even for doctors to advise the surgery as there are a number of other factors involved. Dr. Laurie K. Twells, a clinical epidemiologist at Memorial University of Newfoundland says, “Bariatric surgery is probably the most effective intervention we have in health care.”
Surveys reveal that majority of the patients who undergo bariatric surgery a certain point of time have spent so many years “trying and failing to lose weight.”
Why a doctor has to advise upon bariatric surgery remains in the fact that weight-loss surgery has a very strong ability to reverse the devastating effects of the feeling of being extremely overweight on the patient’s health and quality of life.
According to Dr Tewlls, “I haven’t come across a patient yet who wouldn’t recommend it. Most say they wish they’d done it 10 years sooner. These patients have lost hundreds of pounds over and over again. The weight that it takes them one year to lose is typically back in two months.”
Most of the patients fail to manage and lose weight under regular regime of medication is not because of “a lack of willpower.” A body that has a tendency to stay obese for a long time often defends itself against weight loss. This, it does by drastically reducing its metabolic rate. However, this reverse effect is not seen after bariatric surgery as the surgery changes the contours of the digestive tract permanently.
Comparing the cases of patients for five to 25 years post weight-loss surgery and those who have avoided the surgery, it is found that the formers have reaped long-lasting benefits in improving their health and quality of life. On the other hand, patients, who did not undergo the surgery, have deteriorated physically, emotionally and socially. Post-surgery patients have less likely reported problems related with mobility, daily activities, pain, social interactions and other factors compromising their well-being, such as depression and anxiety.
If you analyse benefits other than visible, there are more medical benefits of surgically induced weight loss. Surgically controlled weight loss helps in normalizing blood sugar, blood pressure and blood lipid levels. It helps cure sleep apnea. However, it does not significantly cure Type 2 diabetes, it always puts the disease in a decreasing side and prevents the life-threatening damages the disease causes to the cardiac and blood vessels.
Furthermore, the benefits of two different kinds of weight-loss surgeries - the gastric bypass and the gastric sleeve are different. It is apparent that both the techniques permanently reduce the size of the stomach. Gastric band procedure, somehow lacks the benefits unless the patients achieve and maintain significant weight loss.
There is a popular impression among people that most people, who have lost weight through surgical techniques have regained most or all the weight they lose in the procedure. However, according to a latest research, only 3.4 percent of the patients returned to within 5 percent of their initial in 10 years of the surgery. As a matter of fact, it should be understood that regardless of the method used bariatric surgery techniques have become much safer today that it was even a decade ago. Moreover, only less than 1 percent who qualify for the surgery actually get it.