Waking up is the main side effect of endometriosis non-surgery
After the BBC reported women waking from endometriosis operations to find nothing had been done, a new study has made that the method.
The consent form ran to two pages and the patient signed both. She was put under for ninety minutes. She was then wheeled out without a single cut and sent home with a leaflet. That was the treatment. I designed it.
We ran the study across three hospitals. Each one had already been sending women home from endometriosis surgery with the surgery not done, as the BBC reported this week. We wrote it down as a procedure and gave it a name. The name is Anaesthetic Only. It means we put you to sleep and then stop.
We compared it with the standard of care. That is what hospitals normally do. Here it means telling a woman her pain is part of being a woman and booking her in for three years' time. Anaesthetic Only did about as well. The p-value was large. That is a number that tells you whether a result might be luck. Ours might.
Patients in the new group did report one benefit. For ninety minutes, nobody told them it was in their head. Several called it the best rest they had had since their first appointment. We have logged this as a side effect.
A spokesperson for one of the trusts told me on Sunday that the finding was welcome. "We have been doing this for years without the paperwork," she said. "It is nice to have the evidence."
There is one risk. A patient in the third group woke up and asked whether the operation had happened. We have no treatment for that.
