Description

Dr. Blackstone explains What a person should consider if her adjustable gastric band procedure is not successful.

Transcript

If an adjustable gastric band procedure is not successful, what new options should a person consider? Most patients who have an adjustable gastric band who have not been successful with losing all of their weight it’s usually because for some reason they just don’t quite work well with that tool. And what usually happens is they’re not able to really control their behavior completely in regards to food with just the band in place. And so the band often will get tightened to the point even that maybe they have dilate the bottom of the esophagus because they’re just too tight, but they’re still eating too much. So in that situation, we’ll the fluid out of the band and then before we decide to convert them to gastric bypass, what we’ll do is we’ll actually start to fill them again and then maybe use medication as a way of cutting their hunger. And again, try to see if we can teach them how to use the band using the medications as an adjunctive therapy. This kind of combination therapy is fairly new and we’ve just started using it, but it seems to be very effective in that small group of people who can’t quite get the neck of the band. If non of that works and in the end they’ve only been able to get off a portion of their weight and maybe they have type 2 diabetes and they need to get all their weight off to get rid of it, then they really have to go and kind of upgrade to a procedure that is higher risk but also highly more effective.