ABSTRACT
The history of abdominal surgery for the treatment of obesity is replete with novel procedures introduced by clinicians who substitute enthusiasm for data in their quest for the ‘‘holy grail’’ of a cure for obesity. The result is an unfortunate history of human experimentation upon a population of patients so desperate for life-saving weight loss, that they put their blind trust in surgeons offering a cure in the absence of convincing long-term outcome data to prove benefit that is worth the risk. The sacrifices of a previous generation of desperate patients combined with the scientific diligence of a small cadre of surgeons committed to bringing scientific sanity to the new speciality of bariatric surgery have made it no longer necessary for patients to choose unproven surgical procedures. The ideal characteristics of a bariatric surgical procedure are suggested in Table 1.
