The team of Obesity surgery Juaneda Hospitals, composed of digestive surgeons Salvador Pascual and Andrés Cifuentesand coordinated by the nurse Alicia Bennassaraccumulates more than 20 years of experience in carrying out interventions Bariatric surgery for weight loss in cases of morbid obesity, through a multidisciplinary team.
THE morbid obesity (body mass index or BMI equal to or greater than 30 kg/m2) is not only an aesthetic problem. Rather, it is a problem that conditions life and increases the risk of premature death.
Brigittea patient of the obesity surgery team of Juaneda Hospitales, expresses her satisfaction after having dared to take the step: “He weighed 114 kilos. I was very depressed because of the obesity problem.. He had gallstones. I had pain for two years and colic for three years, so I decided to come to Clínica Juaneda. Thank God, I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. “I was very well cared for by a very good team, both doctors and nurses.”
And he adds: “Alicia, the nurse, was a lovely person for me, she was with me at all times, even in the operating room, where it is difficult because of the stress, because you don’t know what is going to happen, how you are going to find out later. But she was there, holding my hand, to support me, to help me and to encourage me that everything was going to be fine, and it is.
Alicia Bennassar, a nurse in the obesity unit of the Juaneda hospitals, emphasizes that “the circuit is fast, the the patient must do a preoperative with specialists in digestive, anesthesiologists, surgeons, endocrinologists and nutritionists, who two weeks it’s done because we organize it in a very agile way.
In this process, “the patient is accompanied at all times by the nurse, who in this case is me, or by my colleagues from the Patient Care Service. The patient does not have to do anything, we organize everything according to his schedule and we adapt to his lifestyle. and their work,” explains Alicia Bennassar, bariatric surgery nurse.
Dr. Salvador Pascual, a specialist in general and digestive surgery at Juaneda Hospitals, explains that “surgical techniques will depend on the patient and the associated pathology. In this case [en alusión a una intervención diferente a la de Briggitte] we are going to do a gastric reduction” : reduce the capacity of the stomach and make the patient eat less.”
“Another of the techniques we use – he explains – is gastric bypasswith which we have achieved, in addition to a restrictive model by reducing the capacity of the stomach, a malabsorption modelwith which not only the patient eats less, but not all of the food is absorbed. Not all techniques work for all patients, it depends on their pathologies.
An intervention of this type does not imply a slow and complex recovery: “They leave 24 or 48 hours after the operation.. Before, at 8 o’clock, they start the oral diet, especially liquid, then, in 24 or 48 hours, depending on the evolution, they leave and have very little postoperative pain,” explains Dr. Pascual.
For his part, Dr. Andrés Cifuentes, a specialist in general and digestive surgery at the Juaneda hospitals, points out, in reference to the operation mentioned by Dr. Pascual and which serves as an illustrative example for several of these cases, that “it is a 55-year-old woman, with several comorbidities associated with a problem of morbid obesity.”
This patient had, associated with her obesity, serious problems such as “hypertension, coagulopathy, respiratory failure and venous insufficiency” And for all this, “we thought it was advisable to do a gastric reduction, with which we can lose weight in less than a year,” adds Dr. Cifuentes.
And he concludes that in this way “the patient will be able to improve both his quality and his life expectancy”, emphasizing what all medical organizations and bodies agree on today and where scientific evidence shows it more clearly every day, which Obesity is a disease that can cause serious health problems and shorten life..
