When a patient walks into Saint Francis Center for Surgical Weight Loss, they’ve already tried everything else. The typical patient could be male or female, and the ages range from kids to seniors. This is their last resort when they seek the services of Virginia Weaver, MD, medical director of the center.

 

“Most patients are extremely well educated and knowledgeable,” explained Weaver. “They’ve been trying to maintain their obesity for years; then they come to us.”

 

Weaver, a laparoscopic surgeon specializing in bariatric procedures, chose this field for the challenge of the procedures and the fulfillment of doing a surgery where the outcome makes people happy.

 

“In other parts of the medical field, you have to give people bad news. Doing something where you can watch their lives change and improve is thrilling for me.”

 

“I really enjoy the complexity of the procedures, like gastric bypass,” notes Weaver. “And obese patients are challenging.”

 

While these procedures can offer people a chance to get their life back, there are many misconceptions that remain when it comes to surgical weight loss.

 

“The biggest challenge is education of the general public that there is a solution for the disease of obesity,” Weaver says. “There is a huge portion of the population that continues to suffer from their obesity. They don’t realize their obesity can be treated with surgery with minimal complications.”       

 

The uneasiness about bariatric surgery doesn’t only extend to consumers. Some physicians aren’t comfortable with it, yet research is showing that behavior modification doesn’t work when it comes to obesity, asserted Weaver. Once a person succumbs to metabolic syndrome, she explained, weight gain and subsequent health problems is a cascading spiral that requires more radical steps to reverse.

 

“With surgery the expected weight loss is 60 to 80 percent of excess body fat lost, versus five to 10 percent with medicines and behavior modification.”

 

Locally, physicians have been coming around, she added.

 

“We’re seeing a change among physicians as they see patients we operated on have success.”

 

The rate of obesity in the last 20 years has skyrocketed and during that time, laparoscopic techniques like gastric bypass have been perfected to have minimal pain and shorter recovery times for patients. Couple those two factors and a steady rise has been seen in the use of surgical intervention for weight loss.

 

More than just a surgery center, Weaver’s staff provides a comprehensive system to aid patients in their triumph over obesity. The goal is to cure obesity, so patients are expected to follow strict guidelines and they are followed up with for life.

 

“It’s not just a surgery where we send them on their way,” Weaver clarified. “Patients receive extensive education and training with our dieticians.”

 

They are expected to attend support groups, utilize the dietician services and take responsibility for their weight loss success, she added.

 

The center provides gastric bypass, gastric banding and sleeve gastrectomy.

 

Saint Francis wanted to develop the surgical weight loss center right about the time Weaver came back to Memphis after completing a laparoscopic and bariatric surgery fellowship at Ohio State University. The position was created for Weaver in 2003, and she modeled the program after the one she completed in Ohio.

 

The center handles a high volume of patients and over the past six years, the staff is proud to have helped more than 1,237 patients lose more than 78,663 pounds, about 39 tons.

 

Weaver is also proud of the recognition the center has received, including a center of excellence award from the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS), and similar awards from private insurers like Cigna, Aetna, BlueCross BlueShield and United.

 

“We keep track of our complication rates and our averages are much lower than national for other centers of excellence,” she noted.

 

They also submit all of their data to BOLD (Bariatric Outcomes Longevity Data) to contribute to the studies of outcomes and results.

 

Weaver always knew she wanted to be a doctor. Although she can’t recall one specific moment that solidified her desire for medicine, she knows there was some influence from her family. Her uncle and grandfather were both physicians and she remembers her grandmother telling her stories about the good old days of medicine when doctors would perform midnight appendectomies on a kitchen table.

 

Her education began at the University of Tennessee and she was immediately interested in surgery. She started down the general surgery path but fell in love with laparoscopy, she said. After receiving the fellowship to Ohio State University, she knew bariatrics was her specialty.

 

Overall she wants to see the center grow and expand their reach to more people suffering from obesity. The next step is hiring a second surgeon, expanding the ancillary staff and keeping up with the latest technological advances.

 

“We will continue to build our center at Saint Francis to be one of the premier centers in the southeastern part of the country. We want to stay on the cutting edge and offer the best surgical treatment,” she affirmed.

 

Through it all, it’s about helping people transform their lives. That’s what gets Weaver out of bed in the morning.

 

“You see story after story after story of patients who can’t walk across the room and 18 months later there are doing bike races,” she said. “I can’t imagine a more thrilling or rewarding career.”