Treatment Options

Your bariatric care team at El Camino Health will help you decide which weight-loss procedure is best suited to your condition and needs.

We’ve performed bariatric surgeries for more than 10 years. All of our bariatric procedures in the last several years have used minimally invasive, or laparoscopic, techniques. Laparoscopic surgery uses several small incisions instead of a large incision. Your surgeon uses tiny, specialized surgical instruments to perform the procedure through small incisions.

Advantages of laparoscopic surgery include less pain, smaller scars and a faster recovery. Our surgeons also are trained in traditional open procedures if you’re not a candidate for minimally invasive surgery.

Advanced Weight-Loss Surgery Options

We offer a variety of bariatric surgery options. Your doctor can help you determine the procedure that’s right for you.

Minimally Invasive and Robotic-Assisted Vertical Sleeve Gastrectomy

The vertical sleeve gastrectomy procedure, performed with the da Vinci® Robotic Surgical System, reduces the size of your stomach. Your surgeon staples your stomach, divides it vertically and removes most of your stomach. With about 85 percent of your stomach removed, you can’t consume large amounts of food at one time.

Robotic surgery, a type of laparoscopic surgery, is among the least invasive surgical options. Benefits of robotic surgery include:

• Significantly less pain
• Less blood loss
• Less scarring
• Shorter recovery time
• Faster return to normal activities

The da Vinci Robotic Surgical System provides surgeons with many advantages, including greater surgical precision and control. Robotic-assisted surgery also allows surgeons to operate on people with a higher body-mass index (BMI).

Gastric Bypass Surgery

During gastric bypass surgery — also known as Roux-en-Y surgery — your surgeon creates a new smaller stomach pouch in your upper stomach using a surgical stapler. The rest of your stomach is bypassed and no longer receives food. Your surgeon also attaches a Y-shaped section of your small intestine to this pouch to allow food to bypass your intestines. Bypassing the intestines reduces your absorption of calories and nutrients.

Duodenal Switch

The duodenal switch procedure combines two surgical techniques restrictive and malabsorptive. The duodenal switch allows for less food consumption than normal, but more than with other weight-loss surgeries.

The surgery includes a partial gastrectomy (stomach removal) to reduce your stomach’s capacity, but leaves your pyloric valve intact, allowing for more normal digestion. Maintaining your stomach’s normal functioning helps eliminate some of the side effects that follow other gastric bypass procedures.

Gastric Band Surgery

To perform gastric band surgery, your surgeon places an inflatable silicon gastric band around the upper part of your stomach to create a small upper stomach pouch, which can hold only about an ounce of food at a time. Gastric bands don’t interfere with your food absorption, so vitamin deficiency after surgery is rare. The band can be made tighter or looser by injecting or removing saline, which can be done as an outpatient procedure.