blind study

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From: Steve Goldstein <steve-goldstein@c...>

Date: Sun Aug 26, 2001 1:03 pm

Subject: Re: Blind Study - an oxymoron

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

Yeah, but you don't find out what you " won " until you open your eyes and they

tell you........ " oh, by the way, you got the RNY, now be sure you chew your

food till it is mush, don't drink any water with that food, and let us know

how your pouch is doing

and if your stoma gets blocked, we can re-open it later, etc....... "

Or " make sure you eat protein first, take all the vitamins necessary daily

and you can pretty much eat whatever you can handle, although not as much

because your stomach is smaller..... "

Wow - it will be scarey enough to wake up from surgery adjusting to the fact

that you really went through with it, but to not know WHAT you just went

through!

I don't understand why this would be necessary unless the people running it

want to do an even number of both surgeries and are using this as an excuse

to get some RNYs in when most people want DS.

(I envision -

Dr.s in a private meeting " Well, seems everyone wants the DS now and we only

do the RNY - I know! Lets have a " blind study " and tell the patient they

might get one or the other but they don't know till they wake up what they

got! And charge regular for it, but make it seem like its in the best

interests of medical science!)

A study can be done on the differences between the 2 surgeries just by

looking at the records of those who have had each voluntarily. Seems there

are more than enough " subjects " already for that.

Just my opinion,

Carole