As Young as You Feel

We serve patients across a broad span of ages at Dr. Feiz & Associates, so a new study reaffirming the safety and efficacy of weight loss surgeries for people 60 and over was definitely of interest. The fact of the matter is that, as medical science improves in term of extending people's lives, we are becoming a more and more aged society.

Not so long ago, people tended to accept a dramatic decrease in their health and the quality of their life as simply a byproduct of getting older. Fortunately, that is no longer the case and people are looking at interventions such as bariatric surgery as a means not only of extending their life, but also of maintaining the quality of their lives.

We all know that obesity leads to such serious health conditions as type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. While these conditions are both potentially life-threatening, as medical science has gotten better at saving people lives, they are increasingly becoming as much a matter of the quality of a life as the length of it. Indeed, a growing number of people who had health problems while relatively young are finding themselves surprised to be living well into their eighties and echoing hard-drinking baseball great Mickey Mantle, who famously said that "If I knew I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself."

It's a funny quote, but the travails that more and more of us go through as we age are not so funny. As more and more people find themselves surviving many years after such health calamities as strokes and kidney failure, the benefits of preventing these events actually become more obvious. Getting such procedures as gastric sleeve are about a lot more than simply extending our lives, it's about something that might be even more important: making sure we're healthy enough to actually our life for as long as we're lucky enough to be alive.