Of course, there are some surgeons who are naturally gifted in terms of dexterity, who learn complex maneuvers faster, etc....those are the ones who are said to have "great hands" on their residency evals. I don't think there is necessarily a requirement for a certain degree of fine motor skill....I mean, you need to have normal function in your hands for the most part, but a lot of surgery boils down to repeating a skill over and over again until muscle memory takes over. Don't discount how much of learning surgery is repetition and muscle memory - for example, a resident was asking me about a little flip move I do to reload the needle on a backhand stitch and I honestly had to grab a needle driver to see what exactly I was doing, because it's just not something I think about. I guess there are some operations - sewing the coronaries on an off-pump CABG, microvascular anastomoses, etc - which may magnify issues with dexterity, but perhaps those fields tend to attract the more nimble-fingered residents as well.
Bottom line, there are plenty of people (like myself) who aren't necessarily the most dextrous (but may have other skills such as depth perception, ability to see the operative field as a whole, ability to think through the steps of a procedure, good clinical judgment, etc)....and it's not a problem. There is a lot more than manual dexterity involved in being a good surgeon, and as the saying goes, you can teach a monkey to operate....
)
