Reply To: Researching surgeons – what questions to ask

[ajm222]

quote Good intentions:

If I were in your situation, today, I would contact some of the authors of the 2016 paper. I see that one of them is Dr. Belyansky, who I think has been mentioned as a surgeon who also does explantations. Seems like he and the others would have the very broad view of what’s possible and what works.

Yeah, I might just do that, because I don’t quite get the data in Figure 1. It doesn’t gel at all with anything else in the paper (which is also apparently mostly discussing the merits of this new survey and not really going into as much detail about outcomes from surgeries themselves). I understand this new survey is supposed to better dig into quality of life after hernia repair, but every single category there shows dissatisfaction. Meanwhile, most patients appear to be satisfied on the whole. I could certainly understand overestimating people’s sense of quality of life a bit, or maybe even much more than a bit. But it’s completly opposite. I also don’t quite understand the numbers in that chart and some of the notes. Further, I’ve taken time to visit a number of web forums not strictly dedicated to hernias (for example runners forums and forums completely unrelated to health and fitness that have ‘lifestyle and leisure’ type sub-forums where people occasionally bring up surgery), and people routinely proclaim without qualification that they had the surgery, it wasn’t bad and they are without any issues whatsoever after 5, 10, 15 years etc. There’s usually one in every ten or so that says they sometimes get a twinge once in a while if they move a certain way, but they are glad they had the surgery. Ultimately I’d just like a better explanation for that Figure 1. Not so much because I don’t believe it, but just because I don’t fully understand it. The numbers aren’t numbers of patients, and I don’t get the p values etc. Perhaps you can clarify.