In January my wife had a pallidotomy. (So far very successful!) For a time we had a struggle with the insurance company. "Experimental procedure" of course. Thanks to those on the list who responded to our request for information. After some effort, the insurance company did pay their share of the cost. What we did may be interesting to others. Also of course this is just information, we do not recommend it to anyone. The company may have made their decision in spite of what we did. We had two opportunities for appeal of the "Experimental Proceedure" decision. For the first appeal we were encouraged to state the medical neccesity and benefit of the surgery, so we told of the pain and difficulties of of her condition and most importantly,of the imminent loss of her livelyhood. The appeal told of how these problems had been controlled by the surgery so that life was again tolerable and she could continue with her occupation. The terse response to this appeal was that pallidotomy is determined to be experimental and according to the insurance contract, benefits are denied. There was one appeal left and this one better be right. Reading the insurance contract, medical neccesity and benefit are irrelevant if a procedure is considered experimental. However "experimental" is defined as being determined only by published papers or reports in the recognized medical and scientific literature. We managed to get a call to the person responsible for making the decision to ask for citations to those papers or reports from the recognized medical or scientific literature that had been used to make the "experimental" determination. After "going back to check the records" and a few more calls, the short answer was that there were no such publications used. We were in the process of preparing an extensive appeal that stated that the company had cited no publications and giving citations to papers of Dr Laitenen, among others in the literature that reported the benefits of pallidotomy, when we received a call from the company saying that they would pay. Erv Schroeder [log in to unmask] .