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To ajm22 – one more good reason to wait, at least a short while (relative to the rest of your life) is because the tools to understand the effects of all of the new materials, technology, and techniques, are still being developed.
Defocus your research to the more general “quality of life” definition and the state of the hernia repair field becomes more clear. So many new things have been developed, and pushed, and put in to use, that nobody can really say which is better. I’ve struggled myself to call my problems “pain”- related. It’s not really pain, it’s discomfort, some pain with certain activities, the knowledge that you can’t do what you used to do without pain, etc. You become less of a person. You’re able to live without pain if you want to, but you can’t do what you used to do. I’ve thought at times, that it’s much like an amputation of a limb. If you search for chronic pain issues, you’ll get low numbers, just like if you search for recurrence.
This doctor, below, Dr. Todd Heniford, seems to be leading the push for better data collection and the proper usage of it. Read and view some of his work. It’s very informative. The link below is a recent paper, from after I had my surgery, published barely over a year ago. I wish that I had done more research before I had my surgery.
Here’s another, showing how long they’ve been working on it. https://www.carolinashealthcare.org/documents/cmcsurgery/CCSarticle.pdf
He demonstrates how surgeons can be comfortable that what they’re doing works fine, because they don’t really know the long-term outcomes. There’s very little data collected, and what is collected isn’t very useful.