The Doctor From My 600-LB Life Is Very Shady
Dr. Now built his TV persona on blunt honesty, but the paper trail behind him tells a messier story.
Every episode of TLC’s My 600-lb Life opens the same way: a patient walks into a cramped Houston office and gets told the truth by a surgeon who doesn’t sugarcoat anything. Dr. Younan Nowzaradan, known simply as “Dr. Now,” has turned that tough-love routine into one of reality TV’s most recognizable acts. But a closer look at his malpractice history, patient outcomes, and a bruising divorce settlement shows a far more complicated figure than the show ever puts on screen.
- Patient Michelle Park sued Dr. Now after alleging a 6.69-inch piece of tubing was left inside her body during a gastric sleeve procedure, puncturing her colon; the suit was dismissed in 2013 after he argued he wasn’t the surgeon who left it behind.
- Season 1 patient Henry Foots and Season 6 patient Robert Buchel both died after appearing on the show, with Buchel suffering a fatal heart attack while filming, before his episode ever aired.
- Dr. Now’s roughly 27-year marriage to Delores Nowzaradan ended in a 2004 Texas divorce in which a judge found he’d obstructed discovery and hidden assets, awarding Delores about 70 percent of their community property.
The Malpractice Record Behind the Bedside Manner
Dr. Now’s reputation on My 600-lb Life rests on his willingness to operate on patients other surgeons turn away — the “super-morbidly obese,” in his own clinical language, meaning those well north of 600 pounds. That willingness has also put him in courtrooms. Michelle Park’s lawsuit accused him of leaving a piece of surgical tubing measuring nearly seven inches inside her during a gastric sleeve operation, an object she claimed later punctured her colon. The case was thrown out in 2013 after Nowzaradan’s defense centered on a simple claim: he wasn’t the surgeon responsible for leaving the tubing in the first place.
That defense worked in court, but it did little to quiet questions about how a foreign object of that size could go unaccounted for after a procedure he performed. For a show built on the premise that Dr. Now is the last stop for patients everyone else refused to treat, a dismissed lawsuit isn’t the same as a clean record.
Deaths That Never Made the Cut
Operating on patients who weigh 500, 600, or 700-plus pounds carries genuine, well-documented surgical risk, and My 600-lb Life has lost participants along the way. Henry Foots, who appeared in the show’s first season, died after his time on the program. Robert Buchel, a Season 6 patient, suffered a fatal heart attack while cameras were still rolling — before TLC ever aired his episode.
Robert Buchel died of a heart attack while filming his season — his episode aired only after he was already gone.
Those outcomes underline the stakes of the surgeries Dr. Now performs, and they complicate the tidy narrative arc the show usually delivers: patient struggles, patient meets Dr. Now, patient transforms. Not every story gets that ending, and the show’s editing doesn’t always make that obvious in real time.
A Divorce That Turned Ugly
Long before he was a TLC fixture, Dr. Now was fighting a bitter legal battle at home. He and his wife of nearly 27 years, Delores Nowzaradan, filed for divorce in Texas district court in 2002, citing cruel treatment and insupportability — legal shorthand in Texas for a marriage beyond repair. The case dragged on until 2004, when a judge ruled that Nowzaradan had obstructed discovery and concealed assets during the proceedings. As a result, Delores walked away with roughly 70 percent of their community property, a lopsided outcome typically reserved for cases where a court finds one spouse acted in bad faith.
The Question of Long-Term Results
Even setting aside the lawsuits and the deaths, there’s a bigger structural question the show rarely lingers on: how many My 600-lb Life patients keep the weight off years later. Severe obesity is frequently tied to deep psychological trauma, and bariatric patients — on this show or any other — have well-known rates of weight regain long after the surgery itself. Dr. Now can get a patient through gastric sleeve or bypass surgery, but maintaining that transformation is a separate fight that plays out largely off-camera, long after TLC’s crews have packed up. It’s the same blind spot explored in what the cameras never showed you on My 600-Lb. Life, where the gap between the show’s edited arc and the messier reality behind it becomes hard to ignore.
None of this has slowed the show down — My 600-lb Life keeps finding new patients and Dr. Now keeps delivering the same blunt monologues that made him a minor celebrity in the first place, the kind of tabloid-adjacent notoriety that plenty of other reality figures have chased, for better or worse, as chronicled in reality stars who treat their co-stars like trash. But the lawsuits, the deaths during filming, and the divorce ruling all sit there in the public record, waiting for anyone willing to look past the waiting-room speeches.
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