Shawn Garber
MD, FACS, FASMBS
Shawn M. Garber, MD, FACS, FASMBS founded Strive Surgical on a conviction that has less to do with the operating room than most people expect: that the entire experience should be seamless. From your first phone call to the day you’re back to normal, someone should be with you — and nothing should be left for you to figure out alone. He has spent 26 years proving it out.
About Dr. Garber
Dr. Garber trained in one of the first advanced laparoscopic surgery fellowships in the country, at George Washington University Medical Center, when minimally invasive technique was still proving itself. He performed the first laparoscopic gastric bypass on Long Island, helped develop single-incision approaches that leave virtually no scar, and now teaches those techniques to surgeons nationwide. The practice he built around that work, New York Bariatric Group, has treated more than 45,000 patients across 27 locations and three surgery centers of its own — a volume that matters less as a number than as a discipline. High-volume, specialized teams doing the same procedures every day get better at them, and that consistency is where excellent outcomes actually come from.
Building that practice also taught him that the operation is only half of it. The other half is everything around it: how fast you’re seen, whether someone walks you through what’s about to happen, whether your insurance is handled before it becomes your problem, and whether your surgeon, your imaging, your anesthesia team, and your follow-up are genuinely coordinated or merely adjacent. Patients rarely remember the incision. They remember whether anyone was paying attention.
That same conviction is why so much of his work moved out of the hospital. Today roughly 80% of the group’s surgical volume takes place in its own ambulatory surgery centers — the same surgeons performing the same operations, in facilities designed around those specific procedures. An ASC isn’t a smaller hospital. It’s a purpose-built environment with a dedicated team, a schedule that doesn’t get displaced by emergencies elsewhere in the building, lower exposure to hospital-acquired infection, and a clear path home the same day. For the right patient and the right procedure, it’s simply a better place to have surgery.
Strive Surgical is that model applied across specialties — orthopedics, spine, interventional pain, bariatrics, plastic surgery, and women’s health — staffed by fellowship-trained, board-certified surgeons and physicians and anchored by accredited surgery centers of its own. Every patient is guided by a single coordinated team from the first call through full recovery: scheduling, insurance and authorization, imaging, surgery, and follow-up handled as one continuous experience rather than a series of appointments you’re left to assemble yourself. It’s concierge care in the only sense that counts — someone is accountable for your whole course of treatment, not just their piece of it.
The larger premise is that most of what still sends patients into a hospital doesn’t need to. Procedures that once meant days as an inpatient now happen in an outpatient center, with better recovery and far less disruption to your life. Dr. Garber is building the surgeons, the sites, and the care around them for where those operations are going.
Whether the answer is weight loss surgery, a joint replacement, or care for your back, the goal hasn’t changed: excellent surgery, delivered with attention, and getting you back to what matters.