Minimally Invasive does not mean better, easier, proven outcomes or good excess weight loss. Weight loss surgical patients  should be careful of catch phrases such as “less invasive”, “simpler”, “shorter recovery”, “outpatient” and many others that had been used to  described procedures with less than optimal outcome.  We should not forget the lessons learned from adjustable gastric banding which was also promoted as  ” less invasive, simpler to perform, and be done as an outpatient with a short recovery “.  We all know how that story has panned out. The overwhelming majority of patients who had an adjustable gastric banding  have undergone revision, had it removed or had additional surgeries following the complications  which were associated with this simple procedure.

When evaluating outcome data for weight loss surgical procedures, it is important to bear in mind that the long-term success of these procedures will take years to document.  More often than not the early weight loss is significantly better than the long-term stable weight loss. This has been clearly documented in the case of the adjustable gastric banding and the gastric bypass and laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy operation. Duodenal switch , as described by Dr. Hess using the percentage based technique, has the best long-term documented success of all of the weight loss surgical procedures.   The scientific data reports 20+ years of  successful excess weight loss with a Hess Duodenal Switch procedure.   There has been an alternative proposed to Duodenal Switch recently, the SIPS and SADI  procedures.  As I have already stated in the past, these are not the same as the duodenal switch operation.  Any suggestion or innuendos that SIPS/SADI is the same as the Duodenal Switch is deceptive and misleading.    We have also seen attempts to use the same catch phrases as described above to promote these unproven procedures. The published data that’s been reported with SIPS/SADI is mostly short-term in small population studies.  There are no long-term studies that have documented the efficacy of the SIPS/SADI procedure and “simpler” or minimally invasive does not mean better.