Weight Loss Menus

Weight Loss Diet | Middle TN Hospitals Step Up Marketing Of Weight-loss Surgery

May 31, 2011 – 1:32 am

The direct-mail postcard looks like faded denim – just like that pair of skinny jeans many women dream of fitting into again.

“Losing never looked so good!” the words on the front proclaim. The text on the back says 64 percent of adult women in the United States are overweight, but bariatric surgery can help them be healthier and enjoy life more.

TriStar Health Systems sent out the mailer this month, and Baptist Hospital also is aggressively marketing the weight-loss surgery. The campaigns follow a decision this year by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to lower the weight requirement for the most popular and least invasive procedure. Hospitals are marketing to attract self-pay patients because insurance companies have yet to embrace this lower threshold.

The hospitals have websites with successful patients proudly posing. However, bariatric surgery is not without risks. Nor is it an automatic cure for obesity.

“This is just an awareness piece that we offer bariatrics because a lot of people aren’t familiar with what bariatric surgery is and that there are different options,” said Kindra Hie, a spokeswoman for TriStar, which offers bariatric surgery at Centennial Medical Center in Nashville and Horizon Medical Center in Dickson.

The card lists “a variety of minimally invasive” surgery options, including adjustable gastric banding, sleeve gastrectomy, Roux-en-Y gastric bypass and duodenal switch. Potential patients are provided a number they can call to register for a seminar to learn more.

Cheryl Jones of Nashville attended one of those seminars and decided to have surgery. She underwent a sleeve gastrectomy in 2009 at Centennial and died from complications two weeks later.

The Low Gi Diet Breakthrough

Discover how the low GI Diet can prevent you fro Heart Disease, A Stroke and even Diabetes!

If you want to start burning body fat, starting right now, with a proven blueprint for success with the LOW GI Diet… here’s how to get started…

Lose Weight and Still Enjoy The Foods You Love…

Read More: Visit Publisher Site

Family members said that Jones did not try to diet even though TennCare required her to go to Weight Watchers meetings before it would pay for the surgery.

“It was like a big joke to her,” said her brother Jerry Brown of Lewisburg.

Her sister, Pam Dugger of Franklin, said 62-year-old Jones never should have had the surgery. She believes counseling would have been a better option.

Dugger said her sister died of complications from a lacerated spleen.

However, mortality rates for bariatric surgery are low – so low that many physicians and health organizations recommend it because they believe the odds of dying from a weight-related disease are greater than dying from the procedure.

The American Heart Association issued its first statement on bariatric surgery in March, saying it is a viable option for severely obese patients and that it is “considered a relatively safe procedure, especially in centers that perform many of the procedures.”

The American Diabetes Association also has included bariatric surgery in its “Standards of Medicare Care” in some cases, noting that the 30-day mortality rates for the surgery are now 0.28 percent.

Lauren Demain of Franklin, who is 29, underwent a Roux-en-Y gastric bypass three years ago at Centennial because she wanted to have children.

“Getting pregnant was something that was not going to be easy with having the weight,” said Demain, who is now the mother of a 1-year-old son named Garrett.

Demain said she still benefits from the surgery. She used to eat whether or not the food was good. Now, she has the confidence and willpower to make better decisions.

The two types of surgery that Jones and Demain underwent are more invasive than the one for which the FDA in February lowered the recommended body mass index, or BMI. Adjustable gastric banding, commonly called Lap-Band after the trademarked device used in the surgery, had been limited to people diagnosed as morbidly obese.

The FDA lowered the BMI from 35 to 30 if someone has an existing condition related to obesity, such as heart disease or diabetes. That threshold covers someone 5 feet 9 inches tall who weighs 203 pounds.

Allergan Inc., the company that owns and markets the Lap-Band, said the decision expanded the potential use of the device to 37 million Americans.

Baptist has performed more than 5,000 weight-loss surgeries in the six years that the center has been in existence.

The Metabolic Surgery Center at Baptist Hospital has had over a 50 percent increase in its self-pay volume since the decision. And it is planning on growing that business.

“One thing about bariatric surgery patients is that they are very website savvy,” said Dawn Gibson, the center’s manager. “We do daily updates on Facebook. Since we have been doing that, our number of inquiries has jumped 75 percent.”

Baptist and Centennial say patients are flying in from other states to have bariatric surgeries. Centennial performed about 550 weight-loss surgeries last year and is on track to do 600 this year.

Vanderbilt Center for Surgical Weight Loss also performs bariatric procedures but is a bit more low key.

“The short answer is no, we are not marketing this,” said Dr. Willie V. Melvin III, one of the Vanderbilt surgeons. “The more involved answer is that the whole process of bariatric surgery approval is very complex. We continue to market our bariatric surgical program to the appropriate individual patients. The idea that the FDA has lowered the approval really doesn’t impact that for us.”

Representatives from all three centers stressed that the surgery is only one tool to promote weight loss. Diet, physical activity, group support and counseling also are important.