Study: Alcohol abuse increases after weight loss surgery

I have always been very skeptical about bariatric surgery. Not because it doesn’t make you lose weight – we know it does – and people actually lose quite a significant amount of weight after the procedure. But over the past five years, I have seen many patients who had the surgery begin gain some of the weight back. I think that one of the fundamental issues behind this problem is many patients feel that simply changing the size of their stomach is enough because of the rapid results they achieve right after surgery, without changing their lifestyle will work, that’s not true. This is the case with a new study that found adults who undergo a common type of bariatric surgery to lose weight appear to have a significantly higher risk of abusing alcohol two years after the procedure. Of course, a predisposition to alcohol abuse was one of the best indicators of who would have a problem later, but what many patients don’t realize is that alcohol absorption in this population could be enhanced. The bottom line is: There’s no silver bullet for any medical problem. And no matter how different you look after surgery, if you don’t take advantage of changing your lifestyle, well, you really haven’t changed all that much. Click here to read more.