"When many cures are offered for a disease, it means the disease is not curable" -Anton Chekhov
''Once you tell people there's a cure for something, the more likely they are to pressure doctors to prescribe it.'' -Robert Ehrlich, drug advertising executive.
"Opinions are like sphincters, everyone has one." - Chris Rangel
Smaller Not Always Better: One case in which laparoscopic surgery is inferior to standard surgery - hernia repairs:
Overall, 87 of the 862 patients who had laparoscopic surgery needed a second repair of the same hernia within two years, compared to 41 of the 834 who got open incision repairs. That works out to 10.1 percent and 4.9 percent.
Twenty of the 78 surgeons doing laparoscopic surgery had done more than 250 such operations for groin hernias, also called inguinal hernias, and their recurrence rate was less than 5 percent, said Neumayer, a staff surgeon at the VA hospital and associate professor of surgery at the University of Utah. posted by Sydney on
4/26/2004 08:29:00 AM
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