Dear Friends,

Thanks for all the cogent responses. It looks like the surgeons are just afraid that my friend will do "crazy" things and mess up their oeuvre. I will nail this question down with the prospective surgeon when I speak to him.

Parenthetically, if you want the best surgeon and O.R. facilities for anything, you had best go to a really big city or to a medical institution, (like the Mayo Clinic), that has a national rep. I live in San Francisco and, hereabouts, in a city of 750,000, I found two surgeons who had experience with a novel surgical technique that stabilizes the spine without fusion. Each had experience with precisely two such surgeries. (Probably the same ones.) By contrast, in LA, a city with 3.5M inhabitants, we found a surgeon who had done over 70 of the procedures. It is to that city that my friend will have to travel, despite her intense pain.

My experience with local orthopedic consultations only increased my disdain for medical practitioners. Despite our having prepared lengthly informational documents about my friend's unique problems, both surgeons gave about five minutes to listening to what she had to say, and then ignored all her info., verbal and written, entirely and treated her like a simple textbook case. There really should be some procedure for client review of doctrors pertaining to recertification. Both these bozos needed re-education.

Steve Case, of AOL fame/infamy, has started a new website named, http://revolutionhealth.com that includes a client rating of individual doctors. It is just getting off the ground, so this feature isn't fleshed-out by reviews so far. However, I have posted mine. I hope that in a few years folks are able to use it to steer away from the plank-headed apparatchicks in the medical profession.