Dr. Roger Eduardo

At Yale, that fascination sharpened into a focus. I arrived loving biology (the sheer elegance of how the body works), but somewhere along the way, simply appreciating it stopped being enough. I didn't just want to study the body. I wanted to be able to act on it.

The catalyst itself, though, was personal. During my time at Yale, I lost my grandfather to cancer. What stayed with me wasn't the diagnosis; it was the helplessness around it, the sense that through his experience, everyone had quietly accepted there was nothing left to do. And personally, I felt useless.

I decided I never wanted to be a bystander in a moment like that again. I wanted the ability to step in, to actually intervene for people who were suffering. So I applied to medical school.

I attended Emory University School of Medicine, and like a lot of students, I kept changing my focus, fascinated by whatever rotation and set of problems was in front of me. Somewhere along the way though, I “lost my way,” as I like to put it, and ended up in surgery.

The moment it clicked was after a grueling 24-hour rotation at Grady Hospital, one of the most demanding trauma environments in the country. I walked out exhausted by every objective measure, and yet caught myself smiling. I thought I had gone mad to enjoy such torture, but I found myself proud of the work and already excited to come back the next day and do it again. Surgery, I realized, was the one field where I could transform a life within hours and reverse an illness within days.

My sub-specialization into metabolic surgery grew from my own ignorance. I'll be honest: early on, I wasn't a believer in weight-loss surgery. Like most people, I was misinformed, and I quoted the age-old “diet and exercise” rhetoric as readily as anyone. But the more patients I got to know who were struggling with obesity, and the deeper I dug into the research, the more undeniable it became: obesity is not a lifestyle issue, not a choice. It is a true medical disease, and not just any disease, but the one that drives so many other chronic, life-altering conditions.

I watched it happen: by treating the obesity, I was helping reverse patients' diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, and sleep apnea, all within months! I was giving them back the mobility to enjoy activities again. I was giving them more time with their families. The surgery was never really about the number on the scale. It was about giving people their health and their lives back.

To do it at the highest level, I completed my surgical training at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (a Harvard-affiliated residency program) and then pursued a dedicated bariatric and minimally invasive fellowship at Cleveland Clinic Florida, where I sharpened my expertise in advanced laparoscopic and robotic surgery: sleeve gastrectomy, gastric bypass, revisional bariatric surgery, anti-reflux surgery, hernia repair, and advanced endoscopy. I'm board-certified in general surgery, a Fellow of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery (FASMBS), and hold an active license in Georgia.

However, I didn't stop there. Operating on the stomach became my wheelhouse, but my bariatric patients kept showing me the bigger picture.

So many of my bariatric patients had acid reflux that no medication truly fixed, and legs that ached and swelled in ways they'd simply learned to live with. I couldn't treat one part of the picture and ignore the rest.

That work made me an expert in everything foregut-related, which is why we're opening the Southeast corridor's premier dedicated Heartburn & Reflux Center at Omnia Health, for the people who've spent years managing a symptom instead of fixing its cause. And that same connect-the-dots approach extends to circulation: my work treating varicose veins, leg swelling, and the aching heaviness so many write off as “just getting older” has given patients their mobility and their freedom to move back.

That's why my reflux and vein work grew directly out of my bariatric practice, and why Omnia Health treats metabolic, digestive, and circulatory health as branches of the same tree. Your weight, your reflux, and your circulation feed into one another in cycles most surgeons never address together. I built this practice to address them as one.

I'm married with three wonderful children, two sons and a sweet baby girl who already has me wrapped around her finger, plus a senior dog who is very much a full member of the household, with all the corresponding opinions. When I'm not in the OR or with patients, most of my time goes to the beautiful chaos of a growing family. My honest answer for my greatest accomplishment? Becoming a father. (I'm still holding out for the “Best Dad Ever” mug.)

Outside of family, my three passions are fishing (“freshwater, saltwater, fly fishing, I'll take whatever I can get”), carpentry, much to my wife's chagrin about a surgeon working with power tools, and cooking, especially low-and-slow smoking and barbecue. The water has always been where I reset. I think that's good training for surgery, actually.

I'm co-authoring a book with a psychiatrist exploring the relationship we develop with food from infancy and how it shapes our health for the rest of our lives. You cannot fully heal a person's metabolism without understanding the psychology underneath it. That book is an extension of the same philosophy that built this practice.

Newnan surprised me. It has the same sense of community I grew up with, people who know each other and show up for each other. The broader South Atlanta corridor deserves better access to elite surgical care; for years, people here have driven an hour-plus into the city for specialists and procedures. I want to change that: no Atlanta traffic, no six-month waitlist, and none of the assembly-line experience of a large hospital system.