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When it comes to medications, there aren't any particular medications that an individual needs to take before surgery. After surgery, we do give patients several prescriptions which may include pain medication, anti-nausea medication, and also medication to reduce the amount of acid that your stomach produces, which just helps with the healing process. Some patients are already taking multiple medications to treat their conditions, which might be for high blood pressure or high cholesterol. In general, we will have them continue taking those medications after surgery. However, we also monitor those patients very closely and most of the time we end up gradually weaning them off of his medications, which ultimately is the goal.
When it comes to medications, there aren't any particular medications that an individual needs to take before surgery. After surgery, we do give patients several prescriptions which may include pain medication, anti-nausea medication, and also medication to reduce the amount of acid that your stomach produces, which just helps with the healing process. Some patients are already taking multiple medications to treat their conditions, which might be for high blood pressure or high cholesterol. In general, we will have them continue taking those medications after surgery. However, we also monitor those patients very closely and most of the time we end up gradually weaning them off of his medications, which ultimately is the goal.
Weight loss surgery can be performed in an outpatient setting, which means that the patient would go home after spending a night in a recovery facility. The recovery from the actual operation is fairly quick in that most patients can go back to work at about 2-3 weeks.
When an individual loses a significant amount of weight, it's inevitable that their body changes in the way it looks. Sometimes, patients will feel like they're concerned that they will lose too much weight. As a matter of fact, most people don't lose too much weight, but it may look like a patient has lost too much weight to someone who hasn't seen them for a long time and the last time they saw them, that person was 80 or 100 pounds heavier. One thing we do expect, though, is that patients will have some degree of laxity (or looseness) of their skin. Some patients will have very elastic skin that snaps right back and they really don't have any excess skin to worry about. However, other patients (and I should say most patients) who lose a significant amount of weight will have some degree of saggy skin. Sometimes it's not that much and sometimes there's a large amount of skin that can be removed. Once it's removed, an individual looks fairly normal.
After surgery, one of the main concerns that patients have is regaining weight. Although that can occur, as long as the patient continues to eat relatively healthy food, they eat small portions, and they continue to exercise, it's very unlikely that that patient would regain weight. When you hear stories of patients regaining significant amounts of weight, it's usually the scenario that that patient has stopped following all of the recommendations that we've given them and they are now eating junk food, eating a lot of carbs, eating a high volume of food, eating a lot of sweets, and generally eating foods that are unhealthy for them. If you follow our guidelines and adopt a healthy lifestyle, it will be possible for you to maintain a significant amount of weight loss for the rest of your life and probably be much healthier as well.
Follow up visits after having weight loss surgery are extremely important. In fact, it's as important as having the operation itself. The importance of these visits stems from multiple factors: one, you want to go back and make sure that you are healing properly from the operation. Aside from that, it's important to go back because visiting with your weight loss surgeon on multiple frequent visits also holds you accountable and helps to make sure that you adopt this healthy lifestyle and that you maintain this healthy lifestyle. The follow up visits that we expect patients to come for after surgery are the 1-week post-op visit, we then see our patients at 1 month, and then at 3-month intervals at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months. After 12 months, we see our patients 6 months later (at 18 months) and at 2 years. After 2 years, we continue to see our patients every year for the rest of their lives.
Having a thorough and robust aftercare program is important because that is the component that ensures the greatest amount of success for the patient. It is well documented that patients who are very well engaged with the office that they had their operation at that tend to be the most successful in terms of losing weight and keeping weight off for the rest of their lives.
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