The United States has seen a significant increase in the number of incarcerated individuals, increasing from 250,000 to 6.6 million prisoners over the last three decades. Given the obesity epidemic in the United States, it is not surprising that significant numbers of these prisoners are obese and have obesity-related co-morbidities.
Brown Surgical Associates’ Andrew R. Luhrs, MD, and Marcoandrea Giorgi, MD recently published an article for The American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery‘s Controversies in Bariatric Surgery in which they explored whether bariatric surgery should be offered as a treatment for obese prison inmates.
The doctors concluded that providing the procedure for morbidly obese prisoners is not only the ethical course of action, but it could actually be a more cost-effective one.
