Posted by David Hover on November 22, 2002 at 13:44:07:
In Reply to: Long-term effects and success rate posted by Tom Watson on November 22, 2002 at 05:53:20:
Tom, I agree with what everyone else says. Even Cardiologists in the same group will give you different information. I had my maze on 9/18/02 in Boise, Idaho. It was never as bad as I assumed it would be. I need to post and update and I will. I have talked to one individual in Boise who was all set the have the maze and then she talked to her cardiologist and he scared her to death. In this group there is another cardiologist who works with Dr Barnes the heart surgeon and send patients to him. Dr Barnes went over the statistics with me and the main dangers to the maze are a small percentage of strokes and that is true with all heart surgery. Then needing a pace maker is probabley the second greatest danger. Dr Barness went over all this with me and I would do it again in a minute. If you have been reading this site for a while you should be able to tell that the cure rate is way above 23%. The thing I did was to research the doctors in my area and most of that was on this site which really goes to show how few of us mazers post on the site. I was talking to Dr Barnes office the other day and Gretchen told me that Dr Barnes has done 69 MAZES and 6000 heart surgeries. I don't know what period of time that covers, but only 3 out of 69 of us that have had the maze by Dr Barnes have posted here.