Obesity surgery is now one of the fastest growing procedures in medicine—63,000 cases this year for a 71 percent increase in three years. Thousands of severely overweight people are opting for the surgery after decades of losing and regaining hundreds of pounds with a variety of diet and exercise programs.
About one-third of American adults are overweight—that's 58 million people. More than 14 million are seriously overweight, and about five million are so seriously overweight it affects their health and life expectancy.
Severe obesity is a chronic condition that is difficult to treat through diet and exercise alone. Gastrointestinal surgery is the best option for people who are severely obese and cannot lose weight by traditional means or who suffer from serious obesity-related health problems. The surgery promotes weight loss by restricting food intake and, in some operations, interrupting the digestive process. As in other treatments for obesity, the best results are achieved with healthy eating behaviors and regular physical activity (Flanagan, 38).
The concept of gastrointestinal surgery to control obesity grew out of results of operations for cancer or severe ulcers that removed large portions of the stomach or small intestine. Because patients undergoing these procedures tended to lose weight after surgery, some physicians began to use such operations to treat severe obesity. The first operation that was widely used for severe obesity was the intestinal bypass. This operation, first used 40 years ago, produced weight loss by causing malabsorption. The idea was that patients could eat large amounts of food, which would be poorly digested or passed along too fast for the body to absorb many calories. The problem with this surgery was that it caused a loss of essential nutrients and its side effects were unpredictable and sometimes fatal. The original form of the intestinal bypass operation is no longer used (Flegal, Carroll, Kuczmarski, Johnson, 47).
