Carole,

You make excellent points. I didn't mean to imply that testimonials are completely worthless. People's subjective opinion of the surgery and how it affects their lives is good information. Everyone should hear at least one personal horror story before deciding on the surgery.

But, the scientific data are required to keep everybody honest. Both the doctors and the patients.

As we have seen, there are people who have CS that requires medication to control, but they assert to prospective patients that the CS is mild. On the other hand, there are people who say they are 100% satisfied yet rate the CS as severe.

That's the problem with subjective assessments. It makes it too easy for the doctors and the patients they use to recruit for them to distort the actual nature of the outcome.

There would plenty of ways to present the data that would not be as stiff and stuffy as the way I outlined above. The scientifically acquired information could easily be translated into easy to digest format for people who don't respond to raw data.

For instance, if the data show that 70% of patients experience dripping CS at 75 F, it would impossible for doctors to claim that 90% get mild CS. They would have to say, 7 out of 10 patients get dripping sweat at moderate temperatures. Then the prospective patient gets to decide if that is mild, moderate or severe. It keeps the discussion honest.

Anyway, we probably need a combination Carole/csmess approach to informing patients. One where both the human factors are combined with cold hard facts to give people what they deserve -- the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Without the facts, you get nothing but spin.