Patients should be told by doctors to lose weight, stop smoking or drink less before surgery, under guidelines urging franker conversations about operations.
Pre-operation fitness tests, exercise regimes and contracts committing patients to slim down will be used as doctors acknowledge they have been “too soft” for patients’ own good.
Many types of surgery are much more successful if patients are slimmer and fitter beforehand, and top doctors say “frighteningly” low satisfaction rates are a sign that patients are not being warned that their operations risk failure if they do not make more effort themselves.
Doctors could even be breaking the Hippocratic Oath by shying away from uncomfortable conversations that could mean the difference between success and failure in treatment, Jean-Pierre van Besouw, president of