As of September of this year, there is a “new” option for gastric banding surgery in the United States. It’s a product called the REALIZE™ Adjustable Gastric Band, and it’s manufactured by Ethicon Endo-Surgery, Inc., which is a Johnson and Johnson company.

(For the sake of simplicity, I’ll refer to it as the Realize Band for the rest of this update.)

I call it a “new” product — in quotation marks — because the Realize Band has been available outside of the U.S. since 1996, though under a different product name. And according to the manufacturers, it has been used in more than 100,000 gastric banding surgeries worldwide.

If you are familiar adjustable gastric bands in general, then you already know how this product works. If you’d like to learn more about the Realize Band and how it works, please refer to our expanded article recently posted to the Articles section (or just click the link below).

New article:
About the Realize Gastric Band