Adjustable Gastric Band And Sleeve Gastrectomy: What Do They Entail? - Dr. Naim (VIDEO)

Dr. Naim:
As you can see, the adjustable gastric system, which comes in two different packages – one is the LAP-BAND® and one is the REALIZE® Band. It’s basically a silastic ring that gets placed on upper part of the stomach. This band helps the patient control his appetite or her appetite and also reduce the amount of food that they can eat in every sitting.

The system has a tube, which is connected to the reservoir, which gets placed under the skin. So nothing is visible. The difference here versus, stomach stapling procedure, is that we can adjust the size of this band by injecting some fluid in that chamber. Basically, there’s saline that gets injected and you can see the size of the band gets smaller gradually, and by this adjustment we can control the weight loss, just like we can make the band tighter, if the patient is losing too much weight, not happy, we can make the band looser.

There’s a new procedure that we have been providing through my program within last couple of years, and that’s called a sleeve gastrectomy. One of the reasons that I am a fan of this procedure is that the weight loss is superior to the LAP-BAND® procedure, but I like to emphasize that this is more invasive procedure in the term that I, as you can see, in this picture it involves stapling of the stomach. Not only we have to staple the stomach, about 80% of the stomach gets removed from the body.

So this operation obviously is irreversible, but has great results. There is no need for adjustments, and also unlike the gastric bypass procedures, there’s no dumping syndrome, there’s no malabsorption, and very uncommon for anybody to get into vitamin deficiency from this operation. So, I like to recommend this operation to any of my patients who come to my office, and after talking about the risks and benefits, usually they decide, if they want to proceed with a sleeve gastrectomy or the band or the bypass. So in my program I offer all of these, and we can tailor the patient to any of these procedures that we think they can have the best results.

About Dr. H. Joseph Naim, M.D.:
Dr. Naim received his Bachelor of Science in Biology from University of Southern California in Los Angeles, with distinction in research with departmental honors. He then completed his medical training at prestigious Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in New York City. This was followed with four years of training in general surgery, which concluded with an additional year as Chief Surgical Resident at New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. His interest in weight loss surgery took him to another year of fellowship training in University Medical Center in Princeton, under direction of world renowned bariatric surgeon, Robert E. Brolin, M.D.

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• Bariatric Surgery