An explanation for Cherryl

From: Dr.Moore (BBM1969@BELLSOUTH.NET)
Thu Jan 9 18:28:41 2003


At Thu, 9 Jan 2003, Koolinsask@aol.com wrote: >
>Glad to see you care for your' patients Dr.Moore, and glad to have you help
>us understand some of the medical jargon a bit better!!!!! I do believe as
>well, surgery should only be done when it's a life or death situation,
>however, it took me 9 surgeries, and many problems to understand this!!!!
>Myself , I would not want a doctor just spraying something into me, without
>proof it works as well, but if these people are going to Germany, and it is
>working, is there not some way of saying or finding the proof in that ? Just
>a question here, nothing sarcastic.....
>
>Cherryl

Man, I do have a lot of free time on my hands.

First of all, I left something out in my previous postings- I do think you need surgery if the adhesions cause bowel obstruction. You can die from a bowel obstruction, especially if it perforates.

As far as Dr. K, he could easily prove that the Spraygel works. Why is he not on the Spraygel website as one of the clinical investigators? It sounds like he has more than enough patients and experience. What you need in medicine to prove something works is a "randomized, prospective, double-blind study with a placebo control." This is the gold standard for medical studies. Let me try and explain what this is by breaking down each part. The overall idea is to take a large number of subjects (preferably people, not rats) and randomly split them in half. One half of the group gets one treatment (say in this case Spraygel squirted on a surgical site) and the other gets placebo (in this case maybe saline). Neither the doctor or patient can know which arm of the study they are in (ie "double-blind"). Then you have to have a way to measure results (maybe do a second look laparoscopy and have an independent observer measure the amount of adhesions before and after). The prospective part means that you have to plan this in advance and not "retrospectively" look at the data. I know this is confusing- again, whole college classes are taught on how to read medical journals.

And some of you may be saying, "These studies are impossible- no one would agree to such a study." The simple fact is that these studies happen all the time and change medicine all the time. The most recent example of a beautifully designed and executed study is the WHI (Women's Health Initiative) Study on hormones. 16,000 women took part in a double-blind, placebo control study for 5+years.


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