Las Vegas for Gastric Sleeve Surgery

“I am a Bariatric and general surgeon. I completed fellowship at USC in advanced laparoscopic surgery. We address a lot of complicated general surgeries such as complicated hernias and also complicated gall bladder disease. Although most of my practice is in bariatrics but I still do these procedures.

I am doing weight loss surgery for 10 years. I first discovered it while doing my fellowship at USC, was doing a fellowship in advanced minimal invasive surgery and it was there where I started doing the bypasses and discovered well, wait a minute, we can actually prevent medical problems instead of letting them accumulate and fixing problems.

So ever since I have concentrated on bariatric surgery, I was recruited up to Kaiser and San Francisco where I helped to convert the program from open weight loss program to laparoscopic bariatric program. And then I was recruited and founded the center in Oregon. It became a center of excellence in 18 months which is actually a record time. And finally I am down here in Vegas where I have my own practice and do bariatrics four times.

I think it is important that people know that we do bariatrics all the time. This is not something we added on the side because it was a hot topic or was fashionable all of a sudden. Its more like a passion as we really want to see our patients, get to know them and get to see them succeed, so we do bariatrics hundred percent of the time.

And if you come in our office and meet me, waiting in the waiting room, you may see a skinny person or two there. They have had weight loss surgeries and they were as you are six months ago. That’s little bit about me and our clinic.

With operation, the surgery typically last for less than an hour. The patients are in the recovery room for two and a half hours or so. So they go either to their room in the hospital or home, to the hotel or if they are travelling abroad. And the recovery is very quick, usually the day surgery with anesthesia, waking up and recovering from anesthesia.

Its important that patients know that the day of the surgery they will be walking, talking and drinking and doing all normal activities. By the next day the patients are typically well enough to run a few…. and do things.

They can take a shower next day. Lot of folks take pain medicine for only couple of days so by the end of 2-3 days u are off of narcotics for pain medicines and you are back to your regular duties. You are taking shower everyday and you are doing normal activities at home. So recovery is very quick.

In this surgery the first day under general anesthesia is not fun obviously but the recovery is very quick. Its not like knee surgery for example where people are in pain for a long time, in bed for a long time. Its not like that, people are back to normal stuff quickly.

Its not common I see patients I operate them on Fridays, and I usually see them in the clinic on Monday morning, they usually got their sparkle back in their eyes, and they are able to travel home and the recovery is very quick.

We have had folks come from all over. Folks come from far away, such as New Zealand, we had folks come down from Canada, and lot of folks from the East Coast and the mid west come out and see us. One of the benefits of being in Las Vegas is easy to get to.

The plane flights are very reasonable and there is only about five hundred thousand hotel rooms to choose from. So we have been very blessed, we had patients from all over, and its a lot of fun meeting people and talking to them and talking to them after surgery and getting pictures six months later and they have lost a hundred pounds and getting news that they are engaged like that, so its lot of fun.”