Talk:Post-vasectomy pain syndrome

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In the first source cited for 15% to 33%, it says "Of 396 replies, 108 (27.2%) patients complained of some testicular pain following their vasectomy operation. In 88 (82%) of these 108 patients the pain was brief and was not defined as CPTP, while 20 (19%) patients had pain for > 3 months;". That's 20/396, or 5%. Mdbrownmsw 18:32, 24 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for this correction. I have also added a citation for another study, McMahon et. al., that found a 33% incidence. User:Luqmanskye 23:49, 24 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Intro

I am deleting the "severe and unremitting pain" in the lead. There are more than 50 million vasectomized men in the world. I sincerely believe that if a third of them -- or even 5% of them -- experienced severe and unremitting pain, that vasectomies wouldn't be done. "Severe and unremitting pain" means pain that continuously interferes with every aspect of your life, not the kind of temporary, minor, odd pains that are caused by the skin's repair process after any surgical procedure (even something as minor as having a wart removed).

Your description of severe pain sounds much like the experiences of PVPS sufferers on public forums and websites. There are many such forums. You can find these descriptions with a simple search (here is one example). Many people are surprised when they learn more about the syndrome. For the reason you mentioned, some doctors, as well as PVPS sufferers, have called for the end of vasectomy because of post-vasectomy pain syndrome (see Bowins, Roberts, Caruthers). Some medical procedures have a way of hanging on despite some pretty serious complications. Recall that not long ago Egaz Moniz won the Nobel prize for lobotomy. The belief that the experiences and studies of PVPS must be wrong because no procedure with such complications would be performed is not convincing and shouldn't influence the article. Doksum (talk) 12:54, 10 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability. If you can find a reputable source that makes a claim that's even close to "severe, unremitting pain," then I have no objections to including it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:17, 11 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The listed sources characterize the typical PVPS experience as "some pain," "not troublesome," and only adversely affecting the quality of life for very few men (e.g., four men out of nearly 200 respondents). If you want to see this overblown description restored, then please make sure that you properly source it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:41, 30 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This article still needs a lot of work. We should add some more citations. By the way, which source were you referring to above with the 2% figure? Doksum (talk) 12:54, 10 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The two percent figure comes from PMID 8632554 which says: "The most common complication was post-vasectomy scrotal pain...which adversely affected the quality of life in 4 (2.2%)." WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:05, 10 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The third statistic on the page lists 470 total patients, 182 responses, 18.7% of respondants experiencing pain, 2.3% of respondants experiencing pain that affects quality of life. (182 * .187) yields 34.034, (34.034/470) yields 7.24%. That comes in slightly higher than the ~6% reported for closed ended vasectomies as part of Shapiro and Silber's 1979 study (referenced at http://www.andrologyjournal.org/cgi/content/full/24/3/293), but that might be an issue with the size of the sample pool.

Quality of life pain thus becomes (182 * .023) => 4.186/470 = 0.89% of the original pool, but with no way to determine whether people in life-altering pain elected to not respond to the survey. Shapiro and Silber's study didn't break down the percentage that reported life altering pain out of the 6,000+ vasectomies they studied; they used a single aggregate value for reported cases of PVPS. (We can speculate on whether the 470-person study values would hold true in a larger respondant pool but at that point we're inventing stats.)

The article's probably better without additional fear-language. There's plenty of material to read in the original linked studies. Wingchild (talk) 00:46, 13 December 2011 (UTC

Have you had a vasectomy? have you had one that gave you unrelenting pain and suffering afterword's? I have, People should be aware that their are risks especially if there are sources to back them up.