Reply To: New no mesh surgery in Korea?

[drkang]

I myself am the hernia surgeon Dr. Kang whom Rob mentioned here.
Rob sent an email to our hospital chaplain Stephen who works as an English language interpreter.
I knew HerniaTalk for the first time through him and now I have joined it as a member.
Most of all I show great respect to the staff who run the excellent site for hernia patients,
especially to Dr. Towfigh who answers the questions of the people so earnestly.

I am a 62 year old surgeon in S. Korea who has had more than 15,000 hernia surgery cases including about 6,000 new meshless hernia repairs. (Jack mentioned more than 10,000 hernia cases but the figure includes my whole hernia repairs for last 12 years in my new hospital)
Before the year 2000 I did many times Bassini or McVay operation.
From 2000 to 2012, I did a lot of Open mesh hernia repair like Mesh plug or Lichtenstein.

But as we know the posterior repair like Bassini has high recurrence rate and mesh operation has a big problem of mesh complication.
I began to ponder what the best inguinal hernia repair would be and how to solve all those problems. In the middle of year 2012 I devised a new method.

It is true that the new method is similar to the idea of Marcy that Dr. Towfigh mentioned.
But my method was not based on Marcy’’s from the beginning.
I studied at first with the goal of tensionless and meshless repair and as a result it turned into one that is similar to Marcy operation.
By my lack of knowledge, frankly speaking, I knew Marcy operation after I had devised my repair method.
Even now I don’’t know exactly the procedure of original Marcy operation.
Therefore I am not able to explain exactly what is similar and what is not, when my method is compared to Marcy’’s.

And I don’’t know exactly if Marcy operation works for adult or not.
What I know is that more than 99% of about 6,000 patients since 2012 who have gone through the hernia operation of my new method have no recurrence and have no problem in their lives.

According to Rob’s expression, it is too good to be true. But it is true whether it is too good or not.

With regard to the recurrence rate the earlier result was 0.2%
but recently by telephone interview of the patients whose surgeries are longer than a year old the rate turned into 0.5%.

I continue to improve my method as time goes. So the repairs in the beginning and now are different somewhat. I expect the better result for the future. I am positive.
There are patients occasionally who express a bit of pain for a few months after surgery but there are none who continues to have the follow-up for pain.
The method has been 5 years so far and I can’’t say the long term result for now
but I am much excited and greatly encouraged for the new method of mine for the future.

I again thank Rob and Dr Towfigh so much and I am delighted to know HerniaTalk