Gastric Bypass Surgery Can Be Hazardous to Your Health by Wendy Moyer

Obesity has become one of the major health problems of this century. It is a medical condition where excess body fat has accumulated to the degree that it can adversely affect a person's well being. It often leads to an increase in health problems and/or a reduced life expectancy.

If you are obese the likelihood of acquiring diseases such as type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis, heart disease, certain kinds of cancer, and/or having difficulties breathing while you are sleeping are increased.

However, with the proper diet and exercise regime obesity might be prevented or reversed.

For whatever reasons, many obese people will not go this route. Instead they prefer to try to lose weight by taking diet pills, going on fad diets, or even having surgery in order to get thin. In recent years we've seen the devastating effects of people indiscriminately taking certain diet pills.

And even those who attempt to change their diets and begin to exercise may get frustrated and try to speed up the process by opting for gastric bypass surgery. There are estimates that over the next year more than 90,000 people will be treated for obesity by having gastric bypass surgery. And if the fatality statistics hold true this will be a fatal mistake for approximately 450 of them.

It is believed that as many as one out of every two hundred people who have gastric bypass surgery die. This rate is approximately two times the fatality rate of other major operations that involve similar types of complex surgery. Many attorneys in this field believe that the death rate for this procedure could even be higher.

As more and more people have elected to have gastric bypass surgery the number of medical malpractice claims has increased as well.

There are a number of reasons that patients or their survivors have filed medical malpractice claims for gastric bypass surgery. These include:

- The facilities that patients were treated did not have the appropriately size equipment, such as operating tables, CAT scanners, diagnostic tools, and instruments designed for obese people.

- A number of the surgeons who performed the surgery were overworked. Because some performed as many as five operations per day they were fatigued. Consequently they put their patients at risk.

- When some patients complained of complications such as those that indicated suture line leaks their doctors did not immediately respond. As a result, a number of these patients died.

- Doctors did not educate patients and their families about post-surgery recovery. Therefore the patients and their relatives were not aware of how to quickly respond to life threatening complications if they were to arise.