Re: Blind Study - an oxymoron

[Guest guest]

At 6:23 AM +0000 8/26/01, aveil@... wrote:

>Hi all. I am new to this group. I may be offered the chance to

>paticipate in a blind research study comparing the distal RNY to the

>DS.

" Blind distal RnY vs. DS study " is almost an oxymoron (a

self-contradictory name; examples -- " business ethics " or " military

intelligence " ). That's because once you recover from the surgery,

your life instructions and are different. With the RnY you will risk

blocking your stoma (the slit from you egg-sized stomach pouch to

your intestinal limb) if you do not chew your meat 25 times or if you

eat fibrous veggies like celery. With the DS, you will have no such

restrictions. So, the research subjects (the patients) will know

what procedure they will have received, unless they are totally

dense, and their doctors will have guessed, also (of course, doctors

only have to be uninformed of who got what in " double-blind "

studies). The study will, therefore, by definition, no longer be

" blind " because behavioral variations will have been introduced by

patients' knowledge of what procedure they had received.

My 2¢.

--Steve

--

Steve Goldstein, age 61

Lap BPD/DS on May 2, 2001

Dr. Elariny, INOVA Fairfax Hospital, Virginia

Starting (05/02/01) BMI = 51

BMI on 08/20 = 42