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When surgeons ask if you had pain before repair
I’ve always wondered about this because they will often say that you are more likely to have chronic pain after repair if you had pain before. Seems sort of fatalistic – like if you had pain before surgery, the surgery may not help your pain. It may fix your hernia but not your pain. One has to wonder why that is. This whole hernia repair business – something so incredibly common – seems to have so many possible ways of failing or not fixing the underlying problem. Maybe this is common with certain conditions. I suppose I’ve always heard that people often get surgery for their back or knees (also very common) and are just never the same. Maybe it’s like that.
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2 Replies
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great points. yeah, it’s all so interesting, and there’s so much we don’t really know when it comes to pain. and there’s a lot we don’t know when it comes to implants and the immune system as well. makes all this very tough when it comes to deciding what to do when medical care is needed. we certainly are victims of the times in which we live. there could be a fantastic hernia solution several decades from now. or we could have lived several hundred years ago and having a hernia would mean just wearing a hernia belt and hoping it only worsened slowly throughout the rest of your life.
and what you say about surgery is also true in my experience. you’re never quite the same after. maybe not appreciably worse, but maybe so. but definitely not the same, no matter how minor the surgery.
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The knee comparison is a good one. Know that in the 70s/80s surgeons still believed that the meniscus was a relic of evolution and that did not play any role -> after an injury they often suggested full removal: it is not needed (they said) and you will be perfectly fine without it (they argued).
It is with this historical view that you should look at and listen to any surgeon these days: they might look equally naive in 40 years time…
Knee and back problems are often tackled these days with PT: what I mean by this is that PT is indispensable even after a surgery.
I personally think that after every injury you never are the same person no matter what: you may be “worse” in certain aspects but might have learnt and improved your body mechanics in the process of tackling the injury, which might make you better in other ways….(I don’t know about professional athletes, but I have seen this in martial arts, me included)As for the pain, I guess it is difficult to understand where it is coming from (sometimes not even from the hernia itself apparently) and so there is a higher chance that the surgery might not resolve this issue, which might mean a (long) time is needed? (again I am no doctor) Time is actually the outrageous thing in all this: it takes a long time to get better after a surgery, and those who say you are up lifting a car (just kidding here:) two days after surgery should have their license stripped (this bit I learnt very much early)
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