• Diagnostic surgery
has diagnosis as its highest priority. That is, the
whole point of the operation is to diagnose what's going
on with the patient. No attempt is necessarily made
to treat any disease that may be found. We see many
patients who believe their prior surgery was a failure
when in fact, the surgeon's desire was to diagnose without
treatment. Therefore, the woman may be given a name
for her problem (endometriosis) although when her surgery
is over she has as much disease as she did beforehand.
• Very conservative
surgery is one in which a surgeon might treat very large,
obvious, or easily treatable disease. For example, a
leaking endometrioma might be drained, or an area of
powder-burn implants ablated. Other areas of disease
may, by design, be left untreated. Physicians who believe
that endometriosis can never be controlled and will
always come back often do this type of surgery.
• Aggressive conservative
surgery removes all disease while preserving all organs.
The emphasis is on removing all areas of endometriosis
and possible endometriosis, while maintaining fertility.
It is important to remove the disease from the organs,
not the organs from the woman.
• Radical surgery involves
the removal of the reproductive organs. Certainly there
are some women who have benefited from this approach,
but in experience the majority of women can attain profound
and long-lasting pain relief without resorting to such
drastic measures. In addition, there are a host of reports
of endometriosis persisting after hysterectomy. Removing
a woman's uterus but leaving implants of endometriosis
behind often does not relieve her pain.
The content on this
page is reproduced with kind permission from Center
for Endometriosis Care
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