I was aiming the outline at the book/powerpoint/website - being comprehensive. I am currently engaged in a discussion with Gagner about what he would want. I asked about the agenda and how many surgeons he expected to attend:
"Thank you for your interest. It is principally for surgeons, the agenda will include one day of live surgery (very technical) and a second day of presentations about results, outcomes, management of complications, including nutritional. This will be a small conference, about 250 participants, and we do not have a lot of industry support at the moment. It will be a consensus conference, meaning that the top surgeons in the World are invited to vote and publish a consensus statement later. There is an increasing interest Worldwide, and from younger surgeons, to learn from this operation. We want to send the proper and right messages about the DS, and get rid of unscientific statements circulating."
I then wrote back a longer description of what the vets might present, including our empirical and anecdotal recommendations, as well as a call for proper scientific studies to substantiate these recommendations, and his response:
"The plan is to have this conference, once a year, for the next 5 years. So I have to think about your comments, they will be covered, but again the impression out there, is that we have too much "opinions" and lack scientific facts and evidence. The best example of that is how surgeons decided on common channel lengths...No science!"
I am now trying to convince him that "the recommendations and advice being provided by the veteran DS patients is NOT what we want to be incorporated per se into the DS surgeons' protocols (even if it probably COULD be). The purpose of our presentation would be to raise the concern to the surgeons who are ignorant of the fact that their current protocols are just plain WRONG for most DSers, and to raise awareness of the need for proper scientific studies (akin to what we call "the Gagner poop study" that showed 81% fat malabsorption in a small group of 1-2 year out DSers) of actual nutritional needs of DSers over time, and how best to manage them."
We'll see - I think he regrets making the suggestion at the moment, since he has realized that our recommendations might go against HIS protocols. I will have to appeal to his intellectual honesty next, I'm afraid ....