PRE-OPS ONLY! Post-ops, read about the DS at your own risk.

As you said yourself, THERE ARE NO LONG TERM STUDIES ON THE VSG, YET. So given the current evidence, the duodenal switch IS the best for long term weight loss.

Until you have the studies to prove the VSG is equal to or greater then the DS in long term weight you CAN NOT argue that the DS is not the best long solution.

Apples to apples baby.

I may also add, the reason my surgeon suggested the sleeve, is it has fewer cuts, quicker healing, fewer post-op issues, vitamin absorbtion is less of an issue, and I did not have any issues with diabetes, heart diesease or anything.

I noticed not one of the reasons he said for getting the VSG is that "it has the best chance getting you to 80% + excess weight lost l and keeping you there." I'm not arguing with the points you made, but the whole point of WEIGHT LOSS SURGERY is to lose the weight and keep it off.

Let's add something else to your list:

This is just one article about the gastric sleeve:

"Dr. Greenbaum said the procedure was popularized by surgeon Michele Gagner, M.D., who was concerned about the relatively high mortality rate with laparoscopic duodenal switch surgeries, which tend to be long and complex.

"He concluded that it was better to do a staged duodenal switch, so you first do the vertical gastrectomy, in which you create a small sleeve of a stomach," said Dr. Greenbaum. "Then the patient recovers and loses 100 or 200 pounds, at which point you can go back in at a later time to do the second half of the operation.

"They found that a number of people were doing well without the second half, so other surgeons began doing just the sleeve part—although with a sleeve much narrower than in the duodenal switch because now it is a purely restrictive process. The results were fairly good."

http://www.lourdesnet.org/services/vsg.php

As I mentioned before, anyone considering any surgery needs to reasearch, research, research and not just listen to one or two people or their lists, including myself. I researched almost a year myself.

And yet you didn't rely on published peer reviewed papers for your statistics?

Oh well, I guess you did what you were capable of.

 
Exactly.  This is some in-house information that highlights an in-house surgeon and his knowledge, just like every other surgery practice uses.  That is not peer-reviewed literature; that's Dr. Greenbaum's individual perspective.

I am not hating on Lourdes or Dr. Greenbaum.  That's where I had my surgery, and Dr. G was my surgeon.  I respect him and his knowledge, but even he would be the first to step up and remind people that this is not the kind of "study" people should be using to make a surgery decision.

And the results were just, "fairly good."

Yup. That is a typically moderate and cautious remark from Dr. G. As someone else said, he'd be the first to protest the use of his remarks in place of real data in a discussion such as this. The newly sleeved feller needs to wait a couple years to proclaim the wonderfulness of his procedure. Some folks are doing great. I'm betting he will not be one of them because his starting BMI was much too high for a purely restrictive procedure to be a permanent fix. The odds are stacked against such a person.

If a patient loses 100 or 200 lbs and still needs MORE surgery, you are looking at a patient with a super high BMI.  Patients with extremely high BMI's are a high surgical risk to begin with, regardless of the procedure.

The deleted post:

MizzBombChelle has posted a reply to your post, 'PRE-OPS ONLY! Post-ops, read about the DS at your own risk.' on ObesityHelp Main Weight Loss Surgery Forum

Original message was:
If you have not THOROUGHLY studied the benefits of the duodenal switch (DS), you cannot make a fully informed decision about which surgery is the best one for you:
The DS has by far the best...

MizzBombChelle's reply was:
REALLY???

Thank you for your information.  You can gladly go back to your board and help your newbies.  Us post-ops got this taken care of over here.

REALLY???
Click here to reply to this post.


Uh, this is the main board.  I'll be looking for you to try again over on the VSG board.