Hello, I’m Dr. Michael Snyder. I’m a board-certified general surgeon. I’m a specialist in the area of bariatric surgery and I’m the medical director of the bariatric program at Rose Medical Center and my foundation is throughout all of HealthONE in the Denver metropolitan area. A critical component of considering bariatric surgery is it beneficial and what are the outcomes? Is it beneficial? Let’s talk the easy ones.
And this is not a weight number, this is a life number. Your weight affects what you do, how you do it, and what you’re comfortable doing. And most people that see me have accommodated so much, they may even have lost sight of that. They may even have lost sight of the fact that they think about where they’re going park more than they probably should. They may have lost sight of the fact that the seat extender on the airline is something that’s part of their life. They may have lost sight of the fact that they wouldn’t even consider shopping in the mall ’cause most of the stores don’t accommodate them. They may not even consider the fact that they no longer want to or are comfortable going on a rollercoaster with the grandkids ’cause they’re not sure they’ll fit. They may not even consider the fact that they think about their weight in terms of a lot of the mechanics and life of what they do. So, is there a benefit?
Right away, the benefit of losing weight is managing those issues. And that’s critically important. Quality of life issues with morbid obesity is as bad, at least in an adolescent, which has been studied, as a kid with cancer, as horrific as that is. Now you translate that to adulthood, obviously we’re a little more realistic. So, your image is important, and how you live your life is important. The physiologic benefits. There’s not one parameter of your physiologic functioning that’s not helped with notable weight loss. The things we track regularly are diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, sleep apnea, menstrual irregularity, and PCOS, urinary stress incontinence, joint pain, metabolic things. Those are things that we track and I can give you the data on that. And the results are astounding. And it’s on our website and also we’ll present it to you directly, in terms of how it applies just to you. Then we talk about the more subtle things. Your cardiovascular risk factors, your risk of dying sooner, and having a lower quality of life. Once again, quality of life improvement after bariatric surgery, 95% improvement. Those numbers are astounding. Diabetes, type two diabetes. The improvement and resolution of type two diabetes is in the 80-90% range, within a year of surgery. That’s crazy. It drops your mortality risk from those disease processes over 300%. Once again, nothing I’m telling you is about a judgment of you as a person. The outcomes. People are very focused on weight loss and I’ll give you a range. I’ll give you a range of where I think is reasonable for your weight loss expectations in terms of what we would do and how we do it, independent of procedure, I’ll tell you based on your choice and our discussion of that. But the reality is, as a center of excellence, we present this data nationally, so I can show you our national statistics, and more important, is what I like to get is at least 50% of your excess weight loss and maintained for five to ten years plus. That’s how we’re judged by society. Now, I think that’s relatively low-hanging fruit, and we do much better than that, but that’s really the minimum I would consider as acceptable.