New Medical Textbook on Endometriosis, Now Available!

Recently, Dr. Seckin, the co-founder of the Endometriosis Foundation of America along with a number of well-established physicians, contributed to a new medical textbook on endometriosis. “Endometriosis: A Concise Practical Guide to Current Diagnosis and Treatment” looks to help students, doctors, scientists, physicians, healthcare workers, and patients, to deepen and broaden their knowledge and foster a precise, individualized approach to the treatment of endometriosis.

We hope the following text can provide a thorough and insightful resource for patients, future physicians, and current providers alike, as we work to further our knowledge on a complex and devastating disorder that continues to affect millions of women worldwide.

Preface

With up to 20% of women suffering from endometriosis, the diagnosis and state-of-the-art treatment of this disease have enormous relevance for women’s health. The mainstay for the diagnosis and treatment of endometriosis is laparoscopy surgery. As surgical techniques have been refined over the years and considering that new resection techniques and principles have enabled the gynecologic laparoscopic surgeon to remove previously inoperable deep infiltrating endometriosis, the time has come to publish an up-to-date guide to diagnosis and treatment that is written by experts in the field.

Dealing chiefly with the surgical treatment of endometriosis, this authoritative reference work has been published by an Austrian-German group of scholars, friends, and mentors at the 45-year old Kiel School of Gynecological Endoscopy. This school is an active part of the Schleswig-Holstein University Medical Center in Kiel, Germany, which is one of the founding faculties of the 350-year-old Christian Albrechts University.

The first clinical description of endometriosis may date back to the German physician Daniel von Schroen of Jena (1661–1734) in 1690 and to the Austrian professor Carl Freiherr von Rokitansky (1804–1878), who was the first to describe the pathohistology of this condition in Vienna in 1860.

Several of our mentors and masters in Kiel laid the foundations for our work and have also influenced recent developments in endometriosis research and treatment. Ernst Philipp (Head of Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics from 1937 to 1961) and Herbert Huber (Head of Department from 1961 to 1970) devoted a large part of their scientific research to endometriosis. In 1939, Huber implanted endometriotic tissue into his upper arm as an experiment for his postdoctoral thesis and hoped to observe endometriosis growth. The ‘father of laparoscopy,’ Kurt Semm (Head of Department from 1970 to 1995), founded the German medical journal ‘Endometriosis’, which was published in six editions annually over a period of 20 years. He established the German and European Endometriosis Societies and is also the founding father of our Kiel School of Gynecological Endoscopy. Thoralf Schollmeyer (Director of the Kiel School, 2006–2014) was senior editor of the Practical Manual for Laparoscopic and Hysteroscopic Gynecological Surgery, which was published in 2013 and included chapters dealing specifically with endometriosis.

This book was created with the generous and steadfast support of Dr. h. c. mult. Sybill Storz, our living mentor and esteemed partner in the industrial sector. We are grateful to publish our book through of Tuttlingen, Germany. In addition to continuous, intensive studies and ongoing research into this still enigmatic disease, which requires treatment for life, doctors and patients rely upon high-quality imaging, instrumentation, and equipment to perform advanced endoscopic surgery of endometriosis.

The editors thank all of our authors, who are friends of the Kiel School, for their contributions and diligent work on this book. We express special thanks to our many patients, whose feedback on their sufferings and symptoms helped us to understand key details in the diagnosis and treatment of this disease. We thank Friedrich Gagstatter, Nicole Guckelsberger, and Dawn Rüther for their tireless cooperation and secretarial support, and we gratefully acknowledge the work of our illustrator, Holger Vanselow. It is our dream that this book can help many of us – students, doctors, scientists, physicians, healthcare workers, and patients – to deepen and broaden our knowledge and foster a precise, individualized approach to the treatment of endometriosis patients.

Liselotte Mettler, Ibrahim Alkatout,

Jörg Keckstein and Ivo Meinhold-Heerlein.

Kiel, Villach and Aachen, May 2017.