"The fact I work in Dr. Pitchford's office does not bias me in any way. :-)
Ok, now that the disclaimer is out of the way I will give you my opinion.
Dr. Pitchford is a very quiet, soft-spoken gentleman. He is about 35 years old and a military reservist. He has not done very many surgeries as of yet. I don't think he has done 100 yet. He does the RNY (almost always lap) and the lap band. I had a RNY.
He insists all patients go to his information session before an appointment with him will be scheduled. It takes about 3 months to get into. The sad thing is how many people wait so long to get in, then don't show up for the session. Now they have to wait again and some else could have been moved up if we had been given some notice. :-(
Dr. Pitchford will explain in great detail, but you do have to ask questions. His nurse, Sue also answers many questions and is a great help to patients as they go through the process. She was even nice to me when I bugged her about how my paperwork was going.
Aftercare is stressed very much. He has a support group the 1st Thursday of the month. It started out for post-ops, but became a mixed group after they invited the pre-ops to come and ask questions. It was a big help to me to listen to everyone's experiences. He also stresses the need to work with the nutritionists after surgery.
He explained the risks, but did not over emphasize them. I think the fact that I work in his office may have limited some of his explanations to me, under the assumption I already knew. He did answer any questions I put to him.
Even though he has not done hundreds and hundreds of surgeries I would rate him very high. He cares very much about the outcome of all his patients. He does other general surgeries as well as the two bariatric procedures, so he is not trying to build a big practice out of this. He is the only surgeon in about a 2-3 hour radius that does this surgery, so he could do just bariatric surgery if he wanted to.
I think his surgical skills are great. I could barely tell anyone had been poking around inside me. His bedside is OK, very nice, but cool and polite.
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