| >The treatment cures (in around 97% of cases) tonsilitis. I feel like this is a kind of doublespeak and a rather misleading way of phrasing things. It of course stands to reason that excising an organ in toto will be very effective at preventing a person from having continued inflammation of that organ, as it is no longer part of their body, in the same way that toenail fungus can almost certainly be "cured" by amputating the affected toe. The latter rarely happens, because people understand the value of their toes and realize that having toenail fungus is typically better than having no toe at all. But for organs inside the body, whose function is less plain to the lay person, patients are largely at the mercy of doctors to give them an honest appraisal of the life-long risk of removing them, and whether it might be warranted in a particular situation. It seems that in many of these cases, it would be far more straightforward and honest to simply say "If [organ X] is really bothering you, I can cut it out," rather than cite some pseudo-scientific percentage purporting to describe how often surgery can "cure" some abstracted set of symptoms or "chief complaint." Doctors (especially specialists!) seem reluctant to move beyond this rather myopic way of conceptualizing health care. The idea that medicine is simply a game of "complaint whack-a-mole" might be psychologically comforting to a doctor (as well as financially lucrative in fee-for-service jurisdictions), but, from the perspective of the patient, it makes little sense to fix one symptom only to acquire five more of greater severity. The question people really want answered is: "If I cut out [organ X], is it going to cause me other problems down the road?" But this is the very thing that doctors/surgeons so often seem so curiously (willfully?) ignorant of, even for "routine" procedures. Isn't it rather bizarre that, despite tonsillectomies and adenoidectomies being performed on millions of children over many decades, often for the most trivial of justifications, the analysis described in the linked paper took until 2018 to be completed, by a trio of PhDs no less? Is it just too psychologically burdensome for surgeons to worry about the long term health of their patients or the long-term consequences of their procedures? I think tcj_phx certainly does have a point, that people are not so much interested in "treating symptoms" as they are in doing what will preserve their whole-body health well into old age. If doctors can't say what will best achieve that, either because they don't know or haven't bothered to look into it carefully, they need to be very upfront about their ignorance and inability to provide a well-considered recommendation. |