Craig Chang, MD

As most of you know, these profiles are usually boring and impersonal. They give you the educational history of your prospective surgeon but never really let you know who they are. My goal is to give you some insight into who I really am and why I like caring for weight loss surgery patients. My Education. I grew up in rural Kansas and attended the University of Kansas for college and medical school. I then served two years in the army as a general medical officer seeing sick call and doing physicals all day long (this wasn’t really what I wanted to do when I signed on the dotted line for Uncle Sam). Thankfully, I was allowed to finish my surgery training after two years. I then attended the University of Missouri at Kansas City for my surgery residency. During my last year, I developed an interest in weight loss surgery. As a trainee, I liked doing gastric bypasses -- they were technically difficult and required patience and precision. However, my focus was learning the operation and not caring for the patient. After finishing residency, I spent my final two years in the army as a general surgeon. That’s when I really learned how to care for people. I learned a lot about what motivates people to seek weight loss surgery and what keeps some from it. My goal was to teach my patients how to make new healthy habits and break the cycle of failure with their weight. During this time, I only performed open gastric bypass (through the long incisions). So, I moved to Dallas where I performed a one-year fellowship at University of Texas Southwestern specializing in laparoscopic weight loss surgery. Again, it was the technical aspects of laparoscopic weight loss surgery that attracted me to Dallas…you have to be really good to do these operations at the end of two foot-long stick