Lap-band-related mishaps get airing

Two deaths have been linked to a Bev Hills clinic that performs the procedures, says LAT columnist Michael Hiltzik, perhaps prompting state regulators to investigate the weight-loss surgeries that we know by the 1-800-GET-THIN ad campaign. Five days after 33-year-old Ana Renteria had lap-band surgery, she awoke gasping for breath:

At Lakewood Regional Medical Center she repeatedly went into cardiac arrest, the coroner's report states. She died shortly after midnight last Feb. 14, while friends and family members filled a hospital waiting room and prayed for a miracle. Luna saw her just before she slipped into a coma. "I saw the desperation on her face," she told me. "That said everything."

The Medical Board of California is looking at Dr. Atul Madan, who is identified by the coroner as her surgeon at a Wilshire Boulevard medical office.

The suite's history, which includes the revocation of its accreditation by a professional oversight body in 2009, has been detailed previously in this column. It also lost its Medicare certification last year after the federal government determined that conditions there posed "immediate jeopardy to the health and safety" of patients. The facility, then known as Almont Ambulatory Surgery Center, is now known as Beverly Hills Surgery Center and has been accredited by a different oversight body.

Hiltzik says that high-volume surgical centers fall into a regulatory no man's land (is it the province of state health officials or the medical board?). Sounds like a procedure that should be examined very carefully.