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Gastric Balloon Now Available

Hello, this is Dr. Umbach and I’m coming this afternoon from Blossom Bariatrics and we’re going to be talking about the gastric balloon. We’re very excited to have a gastric balloon here in the United States of America. It’s new. It most recently was used about twenty or thirty years ago and it’s come back to us as being approved by the FDA for use in bariatric patients.

The balloon offers us something nothing else does for weight loss. It offers us an incision-less surgery. What we’re able to do with the balloon is we’re able to put it in the stomach and have the ability to lose weight without doing surgery. So now we can place something in the stomach, help patients lose weight and then we actually take it out.

The way the gastric balloon works is it’s a device. It’s a balloon and it fills up inside the tummy. It’s placed endoscopically, meaning it’s placed with a scope through the mouth. Again, no surgery is needed. We’re avoiding surgery completely with the gastric balloon.

What we do is we put the balloon down, we fill it up full of fluid. Now your stomach is full. So you’re going to get several benefits from that. You’re not going to be as hungry, because you’ve got something in your stomach already, and when you eat, you’re going to get fuller quicker. Then finally, you’re going to stay fuller longer. So the balloon offers us all these advantages around taking care of hunger.

The nice thing about the balloon is it’s temporary. People can get good weight loss with it and after they’ve had significant weight loss, we’re able to take the balloon out and nothing has been changed or had surgery inside your body. So it’s a surgery-less platform and enables us to help patients lose weight. We’re very excited to offer it here at Blossom Bariatrics. Thank you.