I had a disastrous experience with lasik,

I'm guessing your first visit to this BBS is the result of referrer logs. Since I may have triggered that, I felt a responsibility to go back and peruse even though I have no direct interest in Lasik. I have a few comments and thoughts, not all directly related to your site:

- When a paragraph on the home page claims that "Doctors....are being refused publication of their studies in the medical journals because the industry doesn't want the world to know that LASIK can be very dangerous." it would be helpful if you linked to something that backed this statement up. Did I miss it? It is also an extraordinary claim -- not unbelievable, mind you, but extraordinary. What evidence do you offer when that journal says that "we refused them publication because their study was crummy"?

- When the link to "Suicide" offers pretty much an unattributed letter (since deleted) from a BBS (and nothing else that I can see), I can't help but ignore it. Unless you can offer more, who's to say that the suicide note isn't from the surgeon's vengeful ex-wife?

- I share other folk's sympathy, but I see you have been taken to task for plunging in without proper research. I detect some of that from your story. That being said, I expect that there are folks out there who did everything right, researched extensively, yet still suffered a bad outcome. They just may not have started a BBS or visited one.

A few threads following this have talked about "Who is responsible?" Medical decisions are a shared responsibility, IMO, and the delicate balance of who is responsible for what depends on a lot of factors -- unusualness of the situation, gravity, number of alternatives, history of the partnership, technical complexity. In the case of an elective procedure with a track record less than 1/3 as long as the expected average lifespan of the potential patient, I think more of the burden falls on the patient.

Practitioners of different stripes *do* suffer from cognitive dissonance. Some are able to manage it better than others, but it remains that surgeons like to solve problems with surgery, medicos with medicine, etc. For some, throwing barrels of money into the equation for very quick procedures can distort their judgement. Docs are sometimes surprisingly easily swept away by the latest-greatest therapy and identify with it, perhaps to their detriment, then may be disappointed to discover years later that the old therapy worked just as well (or better).

For thoughtful practitioners, the patient who doesn't ask any questions, seems disinterested in details, and says "Oh, whatever you think is best!" should raise a red flag. Some of these folks will be the first to sue you when things go wrong.