Bariatric Surgery: How Has It Evolved? - Dr. Fobi (VIDEO)

Dr. Fobi:
I am Dr. Mal Fobi, a bariatric surgery expert. The other word is weight loss surgery expert. I have been in this field now for 32 years. I am the Medical Director for the Tri-City Bariatric Program and we’ve been doing this surgery at this facility for the last ten years.

Weight loss surgery is now mainstream surgery, that means everybody can do it who has a training. When I got in the field in 1977, it was tabooed. As a matter of fact, weight loss surgery was, they had put a moratorium on weight loss surgery in 1977 in the California area when I started doing this work because the surgery that was done at that time was intestinal bypass and there were so many complications from it that people stopped doing it.

So when I came in the new operation at that time was gastric bypass, the most popular operation at this time. So I was one of the pioneers in that field, with Dr. Mason on the east coast, that finally got gastric bypass accepted as one of the standard of care for treating overweight people.

We are able to do enough surgeries to show that it is effective and that it is safe and I will say that in 1977, we were doing close to 6,000 cases a year in the whole United States. By 1998, we were doing about 13,000 cases and this year, 2009, is estimated that we will be doing about 250,000 operations a year in the United States.

So the surgery has come from a point where it was tabooed, it was not accepted, to mainstream surgery at this time.

Dr. Mathias A.L. Fobi, M.D., F.A.C.S.:
Dr. Mathias A.L. Fobi, is an internationally recognized bariatric surgeon, who has changed the shape of Hollywood heavyweights such as Etta James and American Idol’s Randy Jackson. MAL, as he is known among friends, was born in Nkwen, a small village in Cameroon, West Africa. He is a member of the first batch, class of 1965, 0f Sacred Heart College in Mankon Bamenda in Cameroon. He came to the USA through the African Scholarship Program for American Universities (ASPAU) in 1966. This was a scholarship program that was inaugurated by President Kennedy along with the Peace Corps Program.

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• Bariatric Surgery