Your surgeries lasted for a long time! I’m so happy for you that you were without hernias for so many years.
I did a quick literature search and it seems that mesh is the clear standard of care and does not have statistically different outcomes (infection, quality of life, etc.), other than recurrence. The inguinal hernia recurrence rate in one study was 7% without mesh and 1% with mesh. That was from surgeries in the late 1990s and I’ll bet the rates have slightly improved since then. There are many meta-analysis studies that show no difference in outcomes other than recurrence.
I think a very valuable conversation (with a surgeon) to have here is about the different types of mesh used and how surgical approaches have changed over time. There are certainly benefits of only having local anesthesia… so that’s another useful thing to discuss. I would be a bit wary of a surgeon who ONLY does surgeries without mesh, because that is contrary to the standard of care. In an of itself, that is probably not a huge deal. But what other practices do they not follow that are standard? Do they scrub in for the surgery? Use an antibiotic wash? Etc. I believe fully in clinical decision-making (instead of a robot-like adherence to clinical guidelines/best practices)... but not EVER using mesh does not appear to be clinical decision-making, but rather an unwillingness to follow clinical best-practices, which is concerning to me.
I am a public health researcher (focusing on provider implementation of clinical guidelines) and would be happy to provide you with some studies or help you to interpret findings or the patient population to see what may be most relevant to you… just let me know if that would be helpful.
Good luck! From my very brief lit search, I think that the complication rate may be blown a bit out of proportion in the media/lawyers. But in full disclosure, my husband had 2 mesh surgeries in his abdomen and he’s done great (it’s probably been 7 years).