ABSTRACT
It is always difficult to gaze into the crystal ball and try to predict the future: this can be difficult enough in any situation, but is even more difficult with a disease such as endometriosis. In just about every article one reads about endometriosis the word ‘enigmatic’ appears at some stage – usually in the introductory paragraph. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word enigma basically means a riddle and enigmatic suggests something that is ambiguous, obscure, or perplexing; this is a very apt description of endometriosis. Having read this book from cover to cover, the reader will see that it does not obey any firm rules: the etiology is still perplexing, and treatment and outcomes can be very variable. In many of our surgical studies we get excited about success rates in terms of pain relief of the order of 70%, but the patients who make our clinics something of a misery usually belong to the other 30% who fail to respond to the prescribed treatment, be it medical or surgical.
