Laser Vaporization and Electrocoagulation of Endometriosis

Chris Sutton
In: Surgical Management of Endometriosis · 2004 · pp. 87–108 · doi:10.3109/9780203501542-8 · W2497241242
book-chapter OA: closed CC0
View on OpenAlex View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-08 ⓘ

Endometriosis has historically been studied only in hospitalized patients, risking Berkson's fallacy and potentially misinterpreting disease symptoms like infertility and pain, leading to confusion and ineffective treatments.

One-sentence paraphrase of the abstract; not a substitute for reading it. No clinical advice. How this works

Abstract

When a disease is studied only in patients in a hospital, the symptomatic and morphologic features seen in those hospitalized patients may not accurately reflect the wild type disease which is prevalent in the population as a whole. This may result in an inaccurate picture of the disease. This is called ‘Berkson’s fallacy’ (he described it but did not commit it),1,2 and it may result in an increased chance of a positive or negative correlation being found where no or weak correlation actually exists. Since a description by Rokitansky in 1869,3 endometriosis has usually required surgery in a hospital or other health care facility for diagnosis. Thus, the risk has always silently existed that endometriosis could be spuriously linked to symptoms or other disease states due to the effects of Berkson’s fallacy acting unrecognized in hospitalized patients. Modern hindsight suggests that the decades-old effects of Berkson’s fallacy have led to misinterpretation of the symptoms of infertility and pain associated with endometriosis. This in turn has led to confusion and ineffective treatment which are the unfortunate modern hallmarks of the disease.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

Condition tags

endometriosisinfertility

Citation neighborhood

Papers in the corpus that this work cites (lower rings, blue) and that cite this one (upper rings, green). Dot size scales with the paper's in-corpus citation count — bigger dot = more influential within the endo/adeno field. Click a dot to open that paper. [ expand to 2 hops ] — adds papers reached through this work's immediate citers/citees. Heavier; up to 60 extra dots.

References (11)

Source provenance

openalex
last seen: 2026-06-10T17:14:06.276822+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK