A New Respect for surgeons

Everyone sees the miracles of doctors and surgeons on television with shows like Extreme Makeover and The Swan where in an hour of television the people are healthy and more beautiful than ever. Shows like ER and Grey's Anatomy show that surgeries though with risk, don't seem to take that much time and can be reflected upon with a voice over by Meredith. In House, surgeries are used when the MRI machine has yet to field any results and House just might know what problem the person has if only he can get somebody to open them up.

I'd like to dispell a few things. First of all, I love hospital dramas. There is just something alluring about whether or not the doctor is going to figure out what the disease is or if the patient is going to be saved in time...no matter how rare the disease or the weird treatment plan (In today's season premiere of House, Cuddy says that Cortisol-cortisone shot is used to treat infections when it would actually increase the chances of an infections). This is also why I think of all of these shows, I like Grey's Anatomy the least. It's basically a soap opera at the hospital with very little medical stuff.

Secondly, and most of all though, I think that surgery would be difficult to learn. In part of my training at school, we have to learn the anatomy of the body. Part of the learning of anatomy includes a very intensive dissection lab. As a dental student, I don't have to learn the lower limb or the reproductive organ but that leaves me with the head, neck, thorax, abdomen and upper limb to learn.

We are currently learning about the abdomen. For all of those who learned about the body in biology 30 will be disappointed. Even when you open up The body does not look like it does in the textbooks. There are recesses, pouches, veins, arteries, nerves, fat, muscles, organs and skin going all over the place. It's not clean-cut. It's truly amazing how the body is assembled. It's almost like an ordered chaos.

Anyway to get back to the point of this posting, I wanted to say that I don't think surgery would be easy to learn. You have to know the anatomy and unfortunately not every person has the same dimensions and the same orientation of the organs. You have to know all of that in reference to your patient and never cut too much because the more that is cut the more damage you are making. Making incisions are easy. However, doing incisions don't give you too much room to do a procedure and most people don't take too kindly to getting a procedure with a 2 foot long scar on their body. After making an incision, you still have to fix the problem. You also can't just go down to the organ because there are other stuff in the way including arteries, veins, nerves and other vital organs. It's amazing the sorts of things you can do with a 1 inch incision or less if it is done laproscopically.

Now I can see why many surgeries take many hours to do. It's just not a cut, snip and stich thing.