Skills

[drvechman]

What do you think one needs to be a successful plastic surgeon? It has been said that an "artist's vision" is necessary to really excell. Do you think that means actual artistic ability (painting, drawing, music, artistic bent, etc.) or a just good vision of proportionality, angles, etc.? Do you think one's hands need to bee rock solid like a neurosurgeon? Does it seem to be high/lower stress surgeries?

I guess I don't know exactly what I am asking. Just looking for overall qualities that would be necessary to excell in PRS. Thanks.

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[droliver]

I think technical artistic ability (the ability to draw, sculpt, paint, etc...) is absolutely irrelevent. Spatial relations conceptualization is much more important (I guess you could argue that great artists internalize this already but call it aesthetic vision) as is the more detailed anatomic & tissue characteristic appreciation that you get drilled into your head. It's hard to explain, but you just learn to think about things differently.

I don't think you need terrific hands to most things except for some of the smaller microsurgery cases and some of the neurovascular work in hand surgery. If you've done a lot of vascular surgery prior to it, microsurgery is not that big a transition. If you haven't, it is very hard to get good trying to learn how to do vascular surgery on <2 mm vessels de novo.