Future of surgery?

[spo0kman]

In my 8 years of my little corner of medicine (prehosptial ALS), I've seen moderate changes and read about very massive overhauls involved in up and coming changes. I often think that if you went back 80-100 years ago and said "hey when this guy has no pulse, push hard here and blow here" they would have thought we were nuts and burned us at the stake.

My questions is basically these;

1. In the 8 years it would take me (if I started tomorrow) just to hit day 1 of residency, what will surgery be?

2. Is surgery a dying art and profession with advances in lesser invasive forms of medicine?

3. Play the turn back time game for a sec, tell me if you could do it again, would you choose surgery?

On a side note, I am red/green colorblind. This has never affected me in prehospital EMS, I'd like to think I do a good job as a medic, but how would this effect my ability to be a good surgeon?

Thanks in advance

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[butterfly0660]

I don't know the answer to most of your questions, but for what its worth, one of my attendings is also color blind, and he is a very good surgeon.

 

[njbmd]

In my 8 years of my little corner of medicine (prehosptial ALS), I've seen moderate changes and read about very massive overhauls involved in up and coming changes. I often think that if you went back 80-100 years ago and said "hey when this guy has no pulse, push hard here and blow here" they would have thought we were nuts and burned us at the stake.

My questions is basically these;

1. In the 8 years it would take me (if I started tomorrow) just to hit day 1 of residency, what will surgery be?

2. Is surgery a dying art and profession with advances in lesser invasive forms of medicine?

3. Play the turn back time game for a sec, tell me if you could do it again, would you choose surgery?

On a side note, I am red/green colorblind. This has never affected me in prehospital EMS, I'd like to think I do a good job as a medic, but how would this effect my ability to be a good surgeon?

Thanks in advance

No one has a crystal ball. Surgery has changed but the greatest changes have involved minimally invasive techniques which are wonderful. I am sure that others will be in the pipeline. Like any advances in medicine, surgeons have mastered the minimally invasive techniques and incorporated them into their practices and into residency training.

No one is running the general surgeons out of business. It is far from that. There are so many types of pathology that can only be treated by a surgeon that there is going to be plenty of business around. What has happened (and this has happened to all specialties) is that Medicare reimbursements for performing procedures have been cut. Congress keeps on cutting the salary of all physicians and the costs of keeping an office open have greatly increased. This makes medicine far from being a lucrative profession and forget about joining the country club or becoming a millionaire (unless you belonged to the country club or were a millionaire before).

I absolutely love everything about surgery. I am headed for fellowship in vascular surgery and toward the end of my residency. There is really nothing else in medicine that I love to do as much as operate. Is surgery easy? No, but it is constantly challenging both physiclly and mentally. I love this challenge. Just be sure that before you enter medicine or surgery, that you actually know what you are signing up for. Get the romantic notions out of your head that you see on the telly and really understand what surgeons do and how this career works. The other thing you need to understand is that medical school is pretty tough and you need to do well in order to go into surgery. If you are not willing to do this, then surgery is not going to be for you no matter how much you think you like it.

Your colorblindness should not affect you. You need good three dimensional vision and an ability to recognize surgical anatomy and the hundreds of different variations. If you are able to do this (comes with experience), then you should be able to perform surgery. There are plenty of non-colorblind people who are not able to do surgery for various reasons.

Get your pre-med stuff done at a solid accredited college or university, get accepted into medical school and then see what you like/dislike and make a decision based on that. Again, there are no crystal balls out there for medicine or any medical specialty.