Dr. S. Poulos: Hi, I’m Dr. Stanley Poulos, board certified plastic surgeon here in Marin County, California.

The most gratifying part of our business as aesthetic plastic surgeons is being able to be with people when they’re making that journey to what really is life-changing, to being happy about it.

But those people that can’t take off on that journey because they’re over their ideal weight, they’re over a weight range that would even allow them to have surgery, has been a problem, because we’ve had to send people out without an answer to that. So the Obalon system is for people not necessarily that are morbidly obese, but that are out of the range that’s going to allow them to achieve the look that they desire, right?

So who’s a candidate for the Obalon system? It’s someone in that weight range of 25 to 50, even 70 pounds overweight, that’s going to be able to make a transformation in a year’s period of time with this new product.

A lot of people who are overweight, don’t ever have a feeling that they’re full. They don’t really have anything that tells them when is it time to stop eating. Medically we call that satiety. That means, “I feel full.” So as we have these balloons, you don’t want to eat as much. The caloric intake goes down. About 30 to 60 days after the second balloon, we’ll place a third balloon. The patients who have all three balloons lose twice as much weight as patients who only have two balloons.

Six months after placement of the first balloon, so a six months total period of time, the balloons are removed. So these initial swallowing of the balloon, placement of the balloons requires no sedation. It requires no anesthesia. It’s just a 10-minute procedure to swallow the balloon and have it inflated.

We now have something to offer that’s safe, that’s easy, that’s affordable, and it works. In the FDA studies, it even showed that people who lost that weight, that 25 to 50 pounds in the six-month period of time, at a year, 89% of them had kept the weight off. So it’s something that works and can be life changing, ’cause what we’ve actually done is created kind of an intervention. We’ve changed habits.

The thing that makes the greatest difference in the way the patient looks was that loss of 50 pounds. So that’s an aesthetic intervention that we haven’t had in our business before. And health and wellness really should be a part of what we offer, and it hasn’t been heretofore in the aesthetic industry.

So I think for those patients who have come this far, those patients who are watching this video right now because they have a problem that they’ve not been able to solve, the most important thing to do is take that first step. Every journey begins with a first step, and this is a journey. I’ve seen it work, I know it can work, and it will work for you.