Endometriosis and Surgery

A good doctor will try to exhaust all other treatments before recommending surgery, however, sometimes, surgery is the only solution. In the case of endometriosis, surgery is advised under the following situations:

If you have been diagnosed with endometriosis, which is a condition where there is too much estrogen being produced outside of your uterus, and so far all other treatments like your drugs, hormonal treatment, natural or herbal remedies, change of lifestyle - all these are not working, then your doctor will advise you to consider surgery.

If your degree of endometriosis is unbearable which means the pain is too debilitating and you cannot function anymore on a regular basis, then surgery should be considered.

Also, if you are having a problem getting pregnant, but the possible cause is because of the endometriosis, then surgery will correct the problem, and help you get pregnant. Surgery is also a good option if you used to have this condition, and it came back.

There are two approaches to endometriosis surgery. One is a conservative approach which aims to kill the unusual endometriotic deposits, remove the ovarian cysts and separating the adhesions while taking care not to remove or affect any of the health tissues.

With a more radical surgery, it will mean a hysterectomy which means that it will totally cut off any chances of a woman getting pregnant. This kind of surgery is only done with extremely severe cases where there is zero response to any other treatment and the pain has become unmanageable.

With a Laparoscopy surgery, which is only a small incision under the navel area, about 70% of women report a marked improvement on the pain symptoms, and a 13% increase in the pregnancy rate. There are some risks involved with this kind of surgery because it is invasive such as an accident that could damage your bladder, bowel, or blood vessels which could result in hemorrhage.

With a Laparotomy procedure, a doctor has more room to work with because it means that he will open the abdominal cavity which is a more major operation than the Laparoscopy. There may be instances when a doctor will request that a surgery be done combined with drug therapy. One reason for this is to use the drugs to shrink the growth prior to surgery, then after surgery, a drug will be prescribed to decrease the production of estrogen and progesterone, at least for the next 9 months.

Endometriosis can happen even after surgery and this happens to about 10% of the surgeries done on endometriosis in a year. In fact, if the ovaries are left intact, the chances of recurrence increases by 6 times.