Dr Abbas Discusses ASMBS Statement on Bariatric Surgery

Hello, this is Dr. Abbas and I just wanted to touch base with some of our patients and prospective patients because recently the ASMBS which is the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery put out a statement which essentially has been something that we’ve known for a long time. It’s of course composed of a very large number of bariatric surgeons and non-surgeons who specialize in metabolic surgery. Essentially the problem has been labeling. Calling bariatric surgery “purely elective” is… probably not very true.

And so, and by labeling something you can actually give it a different tinge. We definitely know, and I totally agree with this wording, that it’s medically necessary and the best treatment for those with life-threatening and life-limiting disease of severe obesity. So, it definitely is very important. In fact, there was a position not too long ago which stated, “safer through surgery,” specifically for obesity. And if COVID has taught us anything, in fact, we have found that patients who underwent bariatric surgery six weeks prior and they were exposed to the virus and then got the virus…they fared much better than people who did not have the surgery who are of the same weight.

Because we know that obesity is a pro-inflammatory process, it means that those people are going to be the high-risk patients. We know that usually younger patients don’t tend to have as severe symptoms. But it seems that people who are obese do have a much higher risk of needing to be hospitalized, needing to be on the ventilator and of course, unfortunately, the risk of dying and not recovering from the disease.