[gravelc]

Who said it was harmless? I'm sure any surgery isn't without risk. The mechanism for the most obvious short-term risk is very well known - infection. For that reason alone one has to weigh the benefits and really consider whether surgery is worth it.

Anyway, my skepticism is not so much with this particular result, it's the experimental design generally. How do we know the sample represents the population when it's not randomly selected? At best, it's the starting point of a possibly interesting research tangent, not something I'd be publishing as a stand alone paper.