The Effect of Written Information on Recall of Surgical Risks of Carpal Tunnel Release Surgery: A Randomized Controlled Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Written information has been thought to help patients recall surgical risks discussed during the informed consent process, but has not been assessed for carpal tunnel release, a procedure with the rare but serious risk of complex regional pain syndrome. The authors' objective was to determine whether providing a pamphlet would improve patients' ability to remember the risks of surgery. METHODS: Sixty patients seen for carpal tunnel release were included in this prospective, single-blind, randomized study. Patients received either a written pamphlet of the risks of surgery or no additional information following a standardized consultation. Two weeks after the initial consultation, patients were contacted to assess their risk recall and whether they had read about the operation from any source. RESULTS: There was no difference in terms of the number of risks recalled between pamphlet (1.33 ± 1.21) or control groups (1.45 ± 1.22; p = 0.73). Recall of infection was better in the pamphlet group (p < 0.05). No patients remembered complex regional pain syndrome. There was no difference in the proportion of people who read additional information about carpal tunnel release surgery between the pamphlet (34.8 percent) and control groups (21.4 percent; p = 0.39), but reading about carpal tunnel release surgery was associated with improved recall (2.45 ± 1.13 versus 0.77 ± 0.91; p < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: Reading about surgery improved risk recall, but providing this information in the form of a pamphlet did not, nor did it affect patients' ability to recall the risk of complex regional pain syndrome. These results demonstrate that surgeons should implement additional measures to improve comprehension of surgical risks. CLINICAL QUESTION/LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Therapeutic, I.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".