100 stomach surgeries per year

Dan declined to state the cost of the procedure. While such surgery is usually done for weight-loss, he said stomach-reduction surgery may offer the benefit of curbing diabetes in patients, and is thus recommended by many diabetes associations worldwide. However, he also said this surgery also can cause a lot of sudden metabolic changes to the body.

For example, the surgery increases the sensitivity of the pancreas, whereby a person can be exposed to a precipitous drop in their blood sugar level.

Dan said TT has the most deaths from non communicable diseases in the Caribbean. Further, TT’s rising tide of obesity makes it the world’s third most obese nation, with a quarter of deaths due to heart disease.

Earlier Dan spoke of robotic surgery, which he said can be carried out over the internet by a surgeon who is separated by miles from the surgical blade, each even possibly being separated by the Atlantic Ocean. He listed the advantages of robotic surgery as being the greater precision and great flexibility of the wrist motions, plus the 3-d, high definition images. “It can work in really difficult spaces,” he said.

However Gill said the disadvantages were the equipment’s initial high cost of $1 million, and the $1 million annual cost of maintenance.

He traced how surgery had evolved over years from procedures that left large scars, to those using multiple small points of entry called ports), to single port surgery, to natural orifice surgery (using mouth, anus, vagina or stomach), and to robotic surgery.