There is much medical literature that shows that specialty hospitals, such as the Shouldice Hospital in Thornton Canada, and Individual expert surgeons achieve recurrence rates of less than 3% with non-mesh hernia repair. Non-expert surgeons, it is said, have recurrence rates of 30% without mesh .
The importance of mesh-free hernia surgery is that it avoids the most common and serious complication of hernia surgery, severe chronic hernia mesh pain. The Shouldice Hospital in Canada, which does about 7,000 mesh-free hernia repairs per year, reports a less than 1% occurance off chronic pain. In Dr. Petersen's 36 year experience he has had 3 patients develop significant chronic post herniorrhaphy pain. However no patient developed pain severe enough to inhibit routine daily activities. The first time that hernia mesh pain was reported in the medical literature was in 1998, 6 years after hernia mesh repairs were lauded as the standard of care.
References
- Rutledge, R. H. (1993). "The Cooper ligament repair." Surg Clin North Am 73(3): 471-485.
- Glassow, F. (1976). "Inguinal hernia repair. A comparison of the Shouldice and Cooper ligament repair of the posterior inguinal wall." Am J Surg 131(3): 306-311.
- Lorenz, R., et al. (2021). "Shouldice standard 2020: review of the current literature and results of an international consensus meeting." Hernia 25(5): 1199-1207.
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