SPECIAL FEATURE: health guide.

Byline: Victoria T. Vizcarra

Surgeries can provide patients a new lease on life, but some operations leave more than just skin-deep snags.

The Code of Ethics of the Philippine College of Surgeons defines unnecessary surgery as that which is "without medical indication" - a rather vague delimitation for a field that tends to present various solutions for a given condition. In the country, complaints of this nature are commonly resolved through medical peer reviews, but chief editor Dr. Varghese Thomas has written in the Calicut Medical Journal earlier this year that, "At present, the patient is completely at the mercy of the service provider in third world countries." …