Hello everyone. I am wondering if any of you have switched doctors or been able to go to a different doctor to get a fill. I ask this because I drive 2 hours to my doctor but I work in a hospital doctors office and there is a lap band doctor in our building and I thought it would be incredibly easy to go any time down the hall to get my fill than to drive 2 hours. Advise please!!!!

Not all physicians are willing to take on another physician's patients for lap band follow up care.

All it would take is a call or a visit to the doctor in your building to find out. I've heard that it can be difficult to locate a physician willing to do the fills if they did not perform your surgery.

Best wishes...

You can try and ask him. I currenty live in Fort Lauderdale and I had my surgery when I lived in Jacksonville. Obviously, a six hour drive is out of the question for me. I asked a physician that works at the hospital where I work and he is seeing me and waived the program fee as professional courtesy.

ok well thank you all for your advise. i think tomorrow i might just go down the hall and ask. wish me luck everyone! lol

I had mine back east installed and now live out in So Calif. There were some doctors that were willing to do fills here. One had a huge fee like 3500.00 up front for me to even get a fill appt, then they charge 250.00 on top of it for the actual fill. Even the gal in the office sounded disgusted about that.

What I ended up doing was I had picked a doc to do the fills then went to my primary care doctor. They did a referral for me for the doctor I chose which got declined and I ended up getting a referral to a bariatric doc who is with the same medical group, however I do have to drove 1:45 to get there each way but pay 35.00 for the appt which includes a fill if needed. I was not going to complain getting it paid for this way I do not have to pay the 250.00 out of pocket plus a office visit.

So if you have insurance I would go that route first and see if you can get a local referral, or since you work in the building they might let you just pay a cash discount price. My new doc did make me get an upper GI so they knew what they were looking at.