Here is an excerpt from
www.tiggerpoz.com
Exaggerated claims by surgeons about the results that should be expected from the surgeries they sell---
Have you been told that the surgery being recommended for your dog will return Fido to pre-injury condition? An article on canine ligament injury surgeries in the 'Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association' looked into what results could be expected from the various ligament surgeries in terms of percentages of dogs who regained normal leg function after surgery. The expectable results determined in this study and published in this article are quoted here at this website on the 'Looking Deeper Into a Surgical Recommendation' page.
"... 14.9% of dogs treated with lateral suture stabilization (LSS), 15% of dogs treated with intracapsular over-the-top stabilization (ICS) and 10.9% of the dogs treated with tibial plateau leveling osteotomy (TPLO) regained normal leg function subsequent to surgery."
---- Many dogs do recover fairly well after all the above-named surgeries. Those very small percentages-- 14.9%; 15%; 10.9% --- are the dogs who "...regained normal leg function subsequent to surgery ..." and does not include the many dogs who recovered well enough to have use of the leg, but not to full 100% pre-injury capacity. The point I am making is that vets often over-promise what can be reasonably expected from the surgeries they sell.
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"...There are no studies that I know of that compare [ligament injury] surgery success to doing nothing over the lifetime of dogs who have one or the other experience. I think that these studies don't exist because they never looked very good for the surgery and so surgeons weren't too interested in doing them..."
---Author & vet Mike Richards DVM
I don't like Mike referring to non-surgical recoveries as "doing nothing" since this might imply to some readers that the dog can be allowed to decide his own activity during recovery. But I agree with the implied conclusion that surgeons are in the business of selling surgery, and their preference for surgical approaches should be viewed skeptically.
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There are more than a few vets who are admirably selfless in putting the good of the dog first ahead of the vets' own profits, but for dog owners to assume that all vets are like that is not realistic. Don't think vets in general are any less interested in making money than anyone else who sells a service. You should be as skeptical of a recommendation for surgery as you would be in any other situation where you were being told you needed to purchase a service by the person who would profit by your purchase.
---- Also, to assume vets are always correct in their diagnoses and in their understanding of what are the best treatment options is not realistic. Don't think any doctor must be right because he is a doctor.
