Method and apparatus for treating obesity and for delivering time-released medicaments
OwnerGreg A. Lloydinventor
Life of this patent
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Abstract
An apparatus and method for treating obesity and for delivering time-released medicaments is described and which includes a plurality of space-filling portions which are sized to be received within a human patient's body and which come together in a patient's body to form a structure which provides therapeutic benefit to the patient. In the method of the present invention, the method includes providing a plurality of space-filling portions which are sized to be received within the patient's body; and inserting the space-filling portions into the body of the patient and wherein the respective space-filling portions come together following insertion into the body to form a structure providing therapeutic benefit to the patient.
Claims21
A therapeutic structure, comprising:
- a plurality of space-filling portions which are sized to be swalled and received in a stomach of a human patient, and which magnetically come together within the stomach of the patient to form a resulting structure which provides therapeutic benefit to the patient.
A therapeutic structure, comprising:
- a plurality of space-filling portions sized to be swallowed by a patient and received in the patient's stomach, and wherein the space-filling portions magnetically comes together in the patient's stomach to form a therapeutic structure which displaces a medically effective volume of a patient's stomach lumen to cause weight loss in the patient and which further cannot be passed form the stomach.
A method of providing therapeutic benefit to a patient, comprising:
- providing a plurality of space-filling portions which are sized to be received within the patient's body;
- and
- inserting the respective space-filling portions into the body of the patient, and wherein the respective space-filling portions magnetically come together following insertion into the body to form a structure providing therapeutic benefit to the patient.
A therapeutic method for providing effective weight loss in a patient, comprising:
- determining the volume of a patient's stomach;
- calculating the volume of the patient's stomach, which if displaced, would provide medically effective weight loss;
- providing individually ingestible space-filling portions which are swallowed by the patient and which are received in the patient's stomach, and wherein the individual space-filling portions magnetically come together in the patient's stomach to form a resulting structure;
- determining the number of respective space-filling portions which will form the resulting structure having a volume which approximates the volume which, if displaced, would provide medically effective weight loss;
- ingesting the number of respective space-filling portions to form the resulting structure having the volume which will provide medically effective weight loss;
- and
- after experiencing the medically effective weight loss, and after the step of ingesting the space-filling portions, providing a source of a demagnetizing field from a location outside the patient's body and which causes the resulting structure to disassociate from one another into the individual space-filling portions, each of the individual space-filling portions passing out of the patient's stomach and body.
A therapeutic structure comprising:
- a plurality of space-filling portions which are sized so that they may be individually ingested by a human patient, and which move together, once ingested by the human patient, to form a resulting structure which provides therapeutically effective weight loss.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.