Bariatric Surgeon Serving Summit County Ohio

A Deliberate Drive North

Summit County built its own hospital systems, its own surgical programs, and its own referral habits generations before anyone here needed a reason to leave the county for a procedure. So when a patient from Cuyahoga Falls, Green, or Barberton lands in our waiting room in Lyndhurst or Westlake, that trip wasn’t an accident of insurance networks or a doctor’s referral slip. Somebody asked a question at a support group meeting, or a neighbor two streets over mentioned a name after their own surgery, and the name that came back was Dr. Linden Karas.

The drive itself says something about that choice. Cuyahoga Valley National Park sits like a green wall between Akron and the Cleveland suburbs, and getting from Summit County to either of our offices means either threading Riverview Road past Brecksville and the Boston Mills trailheads, or picking up Interstate 77 and swinging around the park’s eastern edge toward Interstate 480. Either route adds real minutes to the trip. Patients take it anyway, having decided in advance whose hands they wanted doing the work.

That decision usually comes down to wanting one surgeon for the whole process, from the first consultation through the follow-up visits a year later. A patient who has already had a sleeve gastrectomy somewhere else and now needs revision work, or someone managing GLP-1 medication who wants the surgeon in the room for that conversation, tends to be exactly the kind of patient willing to make the trip through the valley twice a month during the lead-up to surgery.

Why Summit County Patients Choose This Practice

Dr. Linden Karas is a bariatric surgeon who built this practice around two offices and one clinical approach: sleeve gastrectomy, gastric bypass, revision surgery for patients whose first procedure didn’t hold, medical weight loss with GLP-1 medication management, and endoscopic weight loss procedures for patients who don’t need or don’t want a full surgical approach. A Summit County patient calling either office is calling into that same program, not a satellite location running a scaled-down version of it.

The surgery itself happens at facilities tied to whichever office a patient starts at. Someone working with the Lyndhurst office has their procedure at Legacy Surgery Center in Lyndhurst. Someone working through Westlake has it at Big Creek Surgery Center or Southwest General, both in Middleburg Heights, which for an Akron area patient is often the closer of the two surgical sites depending on which highway they take in.

Revision cases make up a real share of who drives in from Summit County. A patient whose sleeve or bypass was done years ago, closer to home, and has stalled or come with complications, is often looking for a second opinion from a surgeon who wasn’t part of the original procedure. That’s part of what the drive is for.

Procedures Worth the Trip

Whatever the reason for the drive, the procedures on offer are the same five options patients would expect from a dedicated bariatric practice:

• Sleeve gastrectomy
• Gastric bypass
• Revision bariatric surgery
• Medical weight loss and GLP-1 medication management
• Endoscopic weight loss procedures

Which one makes sense depends on prior surgical history, weight loss goals, and what a patient’s insurance covers, and that gets sorted out at the first consultation, not decided in advance based on which office someone happens to choose.

Getting Here from Summit County

Lyndhurst Office

Surgical care tied to this office takes place at Legacy Surgery Center in Lyndhurst.

Westlake Office

Surgical care tied to this office takes place at Big Creek Surgery Center and Southwest General, both in Middleburg Heights.

Call (216) 377-7257 to reach either office directly.

The drive from most of Summit County runs somewhere between 35 and 45 minutes to either office, depending on which side of the county someone’s starting from. Patients in Cuyahoga Falls, Stow, or Hudson tend to find Lyndhurst the shorter trip, heading up through the eastern side of the park toward the surgical facility at Legacy Surgery Center in Lyndhurst. Patients in Barberton, Norton, or the western edge of Akron often find Westlake comparable or shorter, with surgery scheduled at Big Creek Surgery Center or Southwest General, both in Middleburg Heights. Neither drive is short, and neither is unreasonable for a decision this significant.

Frequently Asked Questions