csmess, I think you mischaracterize your last post by calling it a rant. The facts are correct, the argument cogent and well drawn, and your conclusion is ultimately inescapable. So, while not quite a rant, your arguement exposes a serious flaw in medical accountability and oversight. You are not alone in your complaints about the fairness and transparency in the medical community. You see, it seems that investors, speculators, inside traders, I don't care what you call them, are also concerned about ethics in medicine. Problem is, that investors don't care about much except the buck, Seems that the Sarbanes-Oxley act of 2002 congress exists for the purpose of protecting the rights of investors, not patients. In fact, I'll be willing to wager, when you crunch the numbers, that patient rights are extremely detrimental to investor's interests, go figure.

The situation is not relieved by peer review, either. The sympathectomy butchers pack are the peer review. The only people interested in this surgery and its outcome are the surgeons, themselves, and the hospitals, and the companies that sell medical equipment. For example, if a doctor can make a better pay-to-play arrangement with a hospital, if he can keep producing a string of customers. He, and the hospital are further enriched by the equipment company, and rewarded with incentive pricing and conferences in various resorts. The conferences are where many of the fictions of the sympathectomy butchers comes from, in the form of misleading, distorted very unscientific methods, to repeat csmess.

Then there are the real scientists, in this case at ninds, who are already able to measure, empirically, the frequency and severity of the effects of the neuro-endocrine-immune system. All the symptoms listed in the posts before this one are physiological facts, and they should all know it after one undergraduate neuroscience class. It's not like they don't know, and the information is not all that obscure. When the devastation of sympathectomy is not induced by a surgeon, it is known as a nervous system derangement, or autonomic failure. The symptoms are always difficult to treat, but as I saio above, they are measurable. Endocrine profiles are detectable and measurable by blood tests. Immune effects can be measured after innoculation with some immunogen, and the results can be compared to controls. As Tim, Spirit, and songboy know, they can even take groovy pictures of your heart which you can see malfunctioning in real time.

The hyperhydrosis surgeon jackyll's refer to their mutilation as a service, and they get the victims to pay for it. Standard Operating Procedure. I'm not sure if I can think of a more predatory careless and cynical thing to do to a person. I was honestly stupid enough to think that the Neuremberg trials ended these kinds of practices forever. Well, I was wrong

-immunorat