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Rationing of treatment for varicose veins.

Nasr, Budd and Horrocks will each be embarrassed to learn that their knowledge and search of the literature failed to register our larger, roughly contemporaneous and arguably more successful survey on rationing of treatments for varicose veins.1 They make more than one claim for originality of their work: I will leave it to others to challenge the ‘first published email survey in vascular surgery’ and concentrate on the aspect of rationing of varicose vein treatments (‘There has been no survey to date’). 
 
I have no pique about them missing our publication: it provides a wonderful opportunity to snipe at friends and some comparisons of their survey with ours are interesting. The numbers of surgeons included (from the same pool) were 245 and 411 and the response rates were 44% and 75%, respectively. Based on these observations, one could conclude that: 
 
 
An email survey allows inclusion of a substantially smaller number of people from the same professional group. 
 
 
The response rate to an email survey is grossly less than a postal survey. 
 
 
Publishing a paper in the electronic part of a journal, rather than in full in the paper copy (i.e. our paper in the Eur J Vasc Endovasc Surg) makes it easy to miss. 
 
 
 
Re-assuringly, the main findings of Nasr and colleagues from the 109 surgeons who responded to them about rationing of varicose vein treatments were similar to those from the 307 whose responses we published.