Let Your Concience Be Your Guide

As an almost 3 year band veteran who has experienced some major issues, I could not in good conscience recommend banding in its current form to anyone.  It's a device that can work well under the right cir****tances, with the right person, but there's no way to tell beforehand who will have problems with it.  

Before recommending any product to another person, I have to ask myself a few questions:

-Did the product perform as advertised?

-Did any damage occur in the normal usage of the product when directions were followed?

-Did the manufacturer back the product with a guarantee of satisfaction?  

-Is the product a good value?

I cannot recommend the AGB based on the questions above AND based on the daily postings here and elsewhere of serious and even life threatening complications, removal and revision to another form of WLS that could have been performed as a first surgery, saving time, money, pain, additional surgical risk.

3+ years ago when I was researching, the manufactures of the bands didn't cite a 25% removal rate, today they do.  I wouldn't undergo any elective surgery knowing it had at least a 25% risk of failure, would you?

well as a nurse, I have met plenty of patients who have surgeries with less than a 25% success rate. 

 

  Conscience... yeah, something like that. If a person has one, I'd think they'd feel compelled to try to help others rather than to give them false hope, knowing full well that they're more than likely to be just another statistic.

 

I wrote this and then I suddenly realized that I don't care anymore. People should do whatever they want at this point. The information is out there. This forum has beaten the caring part out of me.

Yeah, Nic, I know. You have gone above and beyond and you have nothing to gain personally, just trying to save someone else from your pain.

It's one thing to have a surgery to save your life and be told its the safest and end up with life threatening complications, not from the surgery itself, but from damage from the DEVICE.

It's hard to deal with the symptoms of this disorder, not be able to function, feel like crap, share the experience on this forum and be called "irrational". Really? Especially when that word came out of the keyboard of someone who lost their band to complications and revised to another WLS. Unbelievable.