Re: Considering GB surgery. Please advice

Like every GP yours can only provide you medically approved treatment for the symptoms you display. Even GPs will vary quite considerably in their response to gallbladder pain. My GP would wait until I was being sick and passing white stools before he recommended an operation.

I don't think 9 is a particularly large number of flushes. I was suffering from biliary colic so intense that I passed out. My ultra-sound showed that my gall bladder was so congested with biliary sludge that they could not determine if I had stones or not. It wasn't until flush number eleven that I managed to get some real improvement and since then I haven't looked back. The pain is a distant memory.

The official statistics on gall bladder removal show a 20% failure rate where the patient doesn't show an improvement or actually gets worse. Since keyhole surgery was introduced the number of operation has increase by about 30%. The overall gallbladder removal mortality rate was 0.56% in 1992.

http://www.jr2.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/band38/b38-7.html

I would urge you to reconsider what the doctor has recommended and give yourself more time to see if you can shift the congestion.

Telman