Is this gaslighting?

[Good intentions]

I’ve found that Pubmed is a good site to browse around on because they link similar articles to the one you’re looking at. I stumbled across the one below that seems like pretty clear gaslighting. Or just ignorance of what the goal of surgery is. People are not cattle or draft horses.

The authors are big names in the field. Chronic pain rising to become the number one problem in inguinal hernia repair is apparently a sign of success. Quality of life was apparently not a consideration in the past. Written in 2016.

https://www.advancessurgery.com/article/S0065-3411(16)30003-3/fulltext

Groin Pain After Inguinal Hernia Repair
David K. Nguyen, MD
Parviz K. Amid, MD
David C. Chen, MD
Published:July 09, 2016DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yasu.2016.04.003

“Quality of life and avoidance of chronic postoperative inguinal pain (CPIP) are now primary outcomes of elective inguinal herniorrhaphy because of the success of tension-free mesh-based repairs.”

[MarkT]

That does seems really weird, so I took a quick look to skim the article.

I don’t know why someone chose that as the summary to be displayed. It is merely the first of five ‘key points’ listed before the article begins…and it is worded rather poorly compared to what is actually written in the article, where part of the intro states:

“Refinement of techniques and mesh-based tension-free repairs has resulted in a decrease of hernia recurrence rates to between 1% and 5% [5]. Chronic postoperative inguinal pain (CPIP) is now the most significant complication and quality of life is the most relevant outcome of inguinal hernia repair [6], [7]. CPIP affects the daily life of 5% to 10% of patients, with downstream effects on patient satisfaction, health care utilization, societal cost, and quality of life [8], [9], [10]”.

The article then talks about the definition of CPIP, different types of pain, relevant anatomy, risk factors, symptoms and diagnosis, treatment and management options, and concludes with a small blurb on future directions.

Just shoddy editing, IMHO.

[Author]

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