As an active person myself, I can assure you that one of my most important goals after your hernia surgery is to get you back to feeling 100% as quickly as possible. This also included minimizing any chances of having chronic pain after your surgery. Every patients will experience pain in the short term, but my job is to ensure you don’t have pain long term after surgery.
What is chronic pain after surgery, and in particular, hernia surgery? What things can I do as your surgeon to help eliminate or greatly reduce your chances of having chronic pain? I hope that by reading the information below it will help you understand the issues and feel more comfortable with having hernia surgery if needed.
Although I take a personal responsibility for patients who develop any of these issues including chronic pain, I also discuss with my patients that chronic pain can occur after ANY surgery. Patients who have knee surgery, back surgery, shoulder surgery, or ANY surgery for that matter, have a risk of developing chronic pain. Thus, chronic pain is NOT limited to just hernia surgery. There is no way that any type of surgeon can guarantee that 100% of their patients are going to have a 100% perfect outcome. The goal that I have, and most high volume surgeons have, is to minimize the factors that we know can affect the outcome for our patients, including everything from reducing pain to infections.
For medically published data, there was a very good article which looked at chronic pain in July of 2016. The article appeared in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons and examined patients up to two years after hernia surgery. The surgery technique that the authors used is identical the technique that I perform in my practice today. In their research, they determined that about 1% of patients had moderate, severe or disabling pain at 1 year after surgery. 89% had no symptoms and 8% had mild and not bothersome symptoms. 2% had mild symptoms that were bothersome.
Read the full article here:
Nice to see some real facts and figures about Hernia Surgery. Any Doctor who says that Hernia surgery is an easy procedure with no complications is misleading you. I recently had Ventral Hernia Surgery with mesh in Sept 2016 and feel essentially 98% great now 3 months post surgery. There is the odd movement or stretch where I can feel a very slight discomfort but this is to be expected after being operated on. Everyone heals differently and some faster than others. My advice to those who will be getting this surgery done is to FOLLOW EXACTLY the instructions of the doctor post operation. No heavy lifting means exactly that. Take it easy, let your body heal and you will most likely be rewarded with a positive outcome. From people I have spoken to they say it takes 6 months to a year to be 100% healed.