Sneak Peek: Interview With WLS Pioneer Dr. Owens
October 4, 2013Editor's Note: Dr. Milton Owens will be hosting a breakout session at the ObesityHelp Conference Saturday, October 5th from 11:00 am – 11:50 am, Location: Mazatlan
Preview Of An Interview With Dr. Milton Owens
(Full interview will be published on ObesityHelp.com on Thursday October 10th.)
OH: (Tammy) Hello Dr. Owens. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I know you are a pioneer in the field of bariatric surgery and that you have since performed over 8,000 weight loss surgeries. Can you share a little about bit about your history in the bariatric community?
Doctor Owens: Well yes. I’ve done a very large number of them. The majority of them are gastric bypasses because I started with them back then. Though I did vertical ring gastroplasties, I became sort of dissatisfied with the results. Back then Dr. Ed Mason (the father of obesity surgery from the University of Iowa and founder of the American Society for Bariatric Surgery) had tried gastric bypass and had one or two complications. He felt the surgery was too dangerous, so he was a strong advocate for vertical ring gastroplasty. I spent some time with him in about 1978, but thought that there was a better way to go. The problem was that patients did a lot of vomiting. They either switched their diets to high calorie soft diets, or the ring may not have been very tight and they simply didn’t lose much weight. We didn’t have an adjustable ring or adjustable band like we use now to fix the size.
I had a friend in Salt Lake City named Dave Miller. Dr. Miller had done quite a few gastric bypasses and he had really impressive results. His patients were doing well afterwards without any vomiting and they continued to lose weight. I spent some time with Dave Miller learning how to do gastric bypass. I was astounded at how much better an operation it was than vertical ring gastroplasty. Over the next ten years that’s just about all I did. Most of the other surgeons continued doing vertical ring gastroplasties but over time they all switched to the bypass. In about 1997, there was a big breakthrough to laparoscopic surgery. Almost simultaneously, Dr. Kelvin Higa in Fresno, and Dr. Allen Wittgrove and his partner, Dr. Wes Clark in San Diego started doing the laparoscopic gastric bypass. I realized that if I was going to survive as a bariatric surgeon, I had to learn to do laparoscopic gastric bypasses and keep up with those high-powered guys.
At that time, there were no training courses or fellowships available as there are now, and neither Dr. Higa nor Dr. Wittgrove wanted to teach anyone else. Dr. Higa did let me watch, as did Dr. Ken Champion when he started doing them shortly thereafter. So I made an arrangement with Ethicon and I went to their research building at USC where I could use their laboratories. I’d go up there 2 or 3 times per week for a couple of months. I spent so much time there that they got suspicious that I was doing research of some kind, but I was able to work on all kinds of ways to do laparoscopic gastric bypasses. After a while, I had it figured it out. I started doing laparoscopic gastric bypasses on my patients and subsequently modified the technique. It was clear that laparoscopic surgery really revolutionized gastric bypass because of the fact that it’s so much easier on patients. It turns out that the previously used large incisions were much of the cause of the trauma and stress patients experienced from the operation. The laparoscopic approach has been quite revolutionary for that reason. Even quite complex revision surgeries can now done this way and patients feel better sooner.
Milton Owens, MD, FACS, FASMBS serves as the director and as a surgeon with the Coastal Center for Obesity. Read his full bio here.
