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Preservation of tissue integrity and function needs to become a priority
Since Dr. Brown butchered me and quite frankly rendered me disabled (I’m 9 months post-op and haven’t missed a day of PT and I’m in permanent dysfunction/discomfort), I’ve been doing serious research and reading.
There seems to be a an absolutely ridiculous disregard for tissue integrity and function in all of these surgeries – especially sports hernias surgery (Dr. Brown’s in my case).
I don’t know why, but every single doctor is only focused on ”making the pain go away” which is why you see so many of them just straight up do triple neurectomies without even trying to figure out if it’s necessary. When a patient comes to you, in pain, they’re looking for help to HEAL BACK to original – including muscle function. It means that PT wasn’t quite enough to take them over the finish line and they need the push from the surgical side to help heal the injury and get them to go back to their original function.
It needs to be a priority as a Doctor to make sure these injuries are approached with a ”less is more” approach. If I would’ve been told how extensively Dr. Brown would butcher my groins, I would’ve waited these 9 months and did more PT. I had pain yes, but I was functional. I was working as a pro dancer. I could go on a hike with friends. I could work on my abs. Most importantly I had HOPE because once in a while everything would click back to normal and the pain would dissipate and so I knew it was still possible. I didn’t have a traditional hernia or a bulge. I just needed a little help. I literally only went in for surgery because we hit a downtime period in my industry and I thought now would be a great time to finally take care of my nagging ache in my groin before going back to business.
Now I still have the pain (so he didn’t correctly identify my injury) but I am seriously, seriously impaired. I can’t properly fire up my core at all across the board and I have way more pain than I had before him. How could it possibly function with the amount of cutting and reconfiguration he did in there?
Your muscles and tissues don’t work individually. They work in harmony with one another, in their original state and configuration. If you alter a muscle’s pathway or configuration – it impact the integrity and strength of every other muscle around it. Now think what happens when someone reconfigures and cuts into SEVERAL layers of muscles, bilaterally and then doesn’t close them back in their original configuration.
As a Doctor treating muscle injuries, if you only know how to ”make pain go away” but not how to preserve and restore muscular function then you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing. What patient in their right mind would want to trade pain for different pain + dysfunction. Not a single person.
The goal should be to try and identify what hurts because of injury that needs help to heal (surgically) and what hurts because of compensation/nearby injured tissues. Not everything that hurts needs to get cut into. When someone gets injured, nearby tissue overworks in order to stabilize the area. A lot of things will hurt. That doesn’t mean cut into all of them extensively.
There needs to start being some respect for the human body and patients as human beings and not science experiments you can discard once you’re done.
In my case, I wasn’t told my external oblique wouldn’t be closed back together once opened and instead half of it was sewn onto my transverse and half of it was sown on top of the first half. I also wasn’t told he would cut into my inguinal ligament and ”free it” – we did not agree on this. I wasn’t told he would cut into and reconstruct my left inguinal floor and canal despite having no weakness or hernia on that side – only had a 1 inch tear in my external oblique aponeurosis. I would never have agreed to any of those things – it makes no sense at the muscular level. Ironically enough – I picked Dr. Brown because of his stance on foreign objects in the body and I trusted him to only do the strict minimum. Big mistake on my part which cost me my career and my life.
I browse this website, facebook groups and others and I see people with very specific symptoms, who can generally tell you in what order their symptoms appeared, but confronted with Doctors who don’t want to listen to their patients and take the time to figure out causality and what’s necessary and what isn’t. They just want to slap a mesh in, take nerves out, and cut into a bunch of stuff that doesn’t need to be cut into – why?
You get paid either way – so why the blatant disregard for the patients long-term well-being and health? Why did you even become a doctor? I know some doctors lose sight of why they picked the profession and some flat-out just do it for the money especially because this is a niche market. But I would hope that at the root of it all – some of you want to genuinely help people.
And if you do – then it’s your duty to preserve tissue and muscle configuration in it’s original state as much as possible – and disclose to the patient very obviously if you’re going to severely damage or alter their tissues. I asked – repeatedly, if I would still have normal core function and if we could just do the strict minimum to help the injury heal.
Maybe I’m just rambling because I cannot get over how violated I feel. But I think this is a discussion that needs to happen.
If you’re a doctor – please ask yourself if what you’re about to do to someone you would do to your own child in that same situation. If the answer is no – then don’t do it.
And please for the love of god – stop advertising ”95% recovery rates”.
Recovery means the person is back to 95-100% pre-surgery/pre-injury level of both pain and function. If the person now has new dysfunction as a side-effect of your procedure or the same or worse pain – then that person didn’t recover. If you don’t have a single athlete that had your procedure and went back to FULLY competitive levels without any issues – then your treatment does not work you should stop doing it. I feel like these numbers are grossly inflated and do not represent what actually happens.
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11 Replies
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Thank you!
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Thank you all for sharing your stories. The patient point of view is very valuable to us surgeons. What we do often has permanent effects on our patients and all operations have risks. We hope to perform the operation that best suits your needs with least risk of damage.
I am available for either online or TeleHealth consultation if you wish to look into your particular situation.
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I think I’m the best example of how some of these doctors don’t care. Look at my case right. I’m still young, lifelong athlete. My tissues are healthy as hell. I’m vegan, I don’t smoke, I don’t drink. Never had a hernia bulge. All my nerves are intact aside from one small part of my right ilioinguinal that was cut at the external oblique level (above the internal oblique).
Why wouldn’t a doctor on here, from Dr. Towfigh to anyone else that want to be leaders in their fields, reach out to me and try to figure out whats wrong or why Dr. Brown’s surgery messed me up this bad? This should interest the hell out of them and could possibly provide them with a real life example to help them better with their next patients. Way more than any textbook or paper written in 2002. They get to see it in real-time. I have 4 years of MRIs to see the progression of injury. I’d be glad to extensively talk with a doctor and work together.
But they won’t do it. If I want to talk to Dr. Towfigh online, its 750$ USD. That’s 1000$ in local currency (Canada). The price of a laptop, 1-month rent for a decent master bedroom in L.A, etc etc. Money that I need to help a cousin back home with terminal cancer treatments that I simply cannot justify spending on a human being for an hour of their time virtually.
I thought about reaching out to her for example because at times I think she does mean well – but for the most part I’ve completely lost faith in doctors and just feel like they genuinely don’t care so I don’t even bother.
It’s quite a shame actually. So much good could be done through doctors that would show compassion – I don’t know how we got to a state where people are scared of doctors and have to sift through which doctor will mess you up the least or will genuinely care for you more than the paycheck.
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That’s insane. I’m genuinely sorry this happened to you.
I struggle with finding out whether these doctors know what they’re doing and just choose to ignore it knowing full well they’re about to permanently injure a patient – or if they’re genuinely so disconnected from reality that they just keep reciting the same recycled stats from 50 years old textbooks from studies on sample sizes inferior to 50 patients that fail to mention any side-effects. Just by browsing this website I can probably find 10-15 patients whose lives were totally ruined by Dr. Chen. Do you think he even acknowledges one of them or attempted to modify his procedures? Hell no. He ignores them and carries on – because god forbid he forgets his ego and actually realizes they’re humans with families, and real lives.
I also think a lot of these doctors genuinely don’t understand the relation of each muscle to one another. They think ”I see hole, I patch hole” ”I see pain, I cut into it”. When its not that simple. When the obliques and transverse are inhibited and fail to fire properly, the pelvic floor starts overworking and will start hurting. Does that mean cut into all of it? Absolutely not. There’s a causality here. The information and research is there. You just have to be willing to do the work as a doctor. All the physio in the world can’t help you if you’re sewn up all over the place. And every tissue you cut into is permanently weaker.
Studies have shown that the body struggles to send proper nervous input through scar tissue. Now imagine you have a bunch of muscles that get cut up, then they cut the nerves and then they suture them in a configuration they’re not supposed to be in. There is absolutely zero, I mean ZERO % chance the patient recovers from that.Saying that someone ”got better” is so vague. Did the person fully get back to pre-injury levels in every aspect yes or no. If no – then it wasn’t a success. If the patient is even 10% worse, even if you fixed the hole or the original issue, then the surgery is a failure and should not be repeated. But they keep doing it.
In other words, you shouldn’t have to need surgery to recover from surgery. The same way you cannot take medication for something and have 3 new diseases as a side-effect of that medication. That’s the U.S Medical Model. Make sure they become lifelong patients. There is no money in healthy patients.
But then again if they were transparent, they would be out of a job because again not a single soul would accept these side-effects.
I just wish someone cared. Like actually cared and was passionate about their job to the point where they go and seek out the knowledge to know what the muscles do and how cutting too much will affect the patient beyond the original injury. I understand everyone is chasing capital but at the expense of what? Real lives being totally ruined.
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could you school me on what the “nerves in the inguinal canal” are?
How did it effect you having all three removed? I’m sorry this has happened to you. I hope you continue to look for someone who can help you. maybe not today, surely with medical advancement, and new doctors on the scene, someone will eventually be able to help you. -
The sad truth is we live in a drug and cut medical system engineered for maximum $. The MD’s and MBA’s over them desire Club Med, Porsches and Mercedes AMG’s. Like the cops they have an internal fraternal code for protection and to ease the conscious. Surgery is also a cause of death for many people. None of these things are ever mentioned. One is seduced into thinking only of the positives. People in pain and suffering are vulnerable to manipulation.
I was told by the surgeon (University of Utah Healthcare) he MAY remove 1 nerve from the inguinal canal. He randomly removed all 3. He said it would all be healed up after 6 weeks. It took 6 months. He said the Bassini ‘repair’ was ‘bulletproof’. It ripped out 18 months later. The 2nd surgeon said the self fixating mesh would fix the Bassini incisional hernia like new. I’d feel like a world champion after. 4.5 years later I’m still in crippling pain 80% of the time.
I contacted lawyers but they dismissed me. Outside of street justice there is nothing one can do. Street justice ends in prison, so its not an option. The only answer I’ve found for pain and injustice and to keep me going through it is through my Traditional Catholic faith. Good luck. -
@dmgonisland – I’m glad I could help you formulate more questions for your upcoming procedures.
Do not hesitate to ask for every single step to be explained – and if at any point the doctor becomes condescending or annoyed that you would ask such technical questions – do not be intimidated into silence. From my experience they do this because they don’t know themselves the full extent of the aftermath of their procedure and you asking makes them uncomfortable so they hide it behind annoyance in a ”I’m the doctor you’re just a common patient you should trust me I shouldn’t have to answer to you” attitude.
But the truth is – its your body and surgery is often times permanently damaging. So it is absolutely in your right to ask that everything be explained down to the smallest cut. And if they refuse – simply find another doctor. There are some out there that actually care about your well-being.
And if somethings seems off – then it is off. I raised questions before my surgeries and I was assured of things and turns out that me – the athlete with 12 years of studying my body and how the muscles interact – was right. And its too late now.
Best of luck to you
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Dear PeterC, I am sorry this has happened to you. I hope you can find someone who can help you get back more function….there has to be a way!
thank you for speaking out on this forum about what you have learned from your experience. In the past few years, dealing with my own medical issues I have found more information and support in online groups like these than any medical personal at the facilities I engage with. Your insights have helped formulate and add to the list of questions I have for the surgeon who is going to put biological mesh between my abdominal muscles to repair a umbilical hernia and incisional hernia at the ostomy site.
Don’t give up! -
Thank you for operating this site. I believe MD’s such as yourself and a small handful of top-level hernia experts are at the leading edge of treatment. I should have gone to one of you from the beginning instead of the ‘run of the mill’ local guys in my area.
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@PeterC. Email me if you want at rentep5@gmail.com I’d like to discuss/brainstorm the nature of these injuries and ways to help heal them naturally.
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@Diana. Genitofemoral, ilioinguinal, iloihypogastric nerves were removed. I didn’t notice any ill effect from the nerve removal other than some low level skin numbness in the region. And the inability to consciously flex the right cremaster muscle. My issue was that the MD told me he ‘may’ remove 1 nerve, but spontaneously just removed all 3.
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