is the skill of surgery easier to learn than anaesthesia

[ALTorGT]

Hi

to discuss a topic that was brought up earlier, is it true that surgery is an easier field to learn and practice (manually based, procedurally oriented, one would feel that with time, you would perfect your skills and it would become routine and easy)?

It seems that there would be a lot of reading of the basic sciences involved in anaesthesia - keeping up with cardiac, renal, neural, pulmonary physiology and pharmacology. Much more difficult than learining how to do a THR in ortho over 5 years and keep bangin em in if ya know what I mean.

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[Dire Straits]

surgery involves more than just cutting and sewing. that's like saying anesthesiology is just putting the patient under and then bringing them back out, and sitting back to read the newspaper in the time between. both specialties require dedication if they are to be mastered, and it's highly subjective to throw around opinions on which one is "easier" to learn.

 

[soon2bdoc2003]

not a chance.. many surgeons spend 7-9 years in post grad training before they go into practice. After 2 months of close supervision you are left alone behind the curtain for hours at a time. The pgy8 vascular fellow in my hospital only does vein strippings and ivc filters alone, he will never ever perform or even start a CEA or AAA alone during his training. Another thing I have noticed is that anesthesia is way more tolerant of substandard clinicians than surgery. There are way too many dopey attendings and burned out 60 year old crnas out there. Nothing worst than presenting a history to an attending and watching him/her whip out a palm pilot to look up enalapril or benicar. Actually, whats worse is taking over a case from a "veteran nurse" and stepping into a total hip revision with a bad heart, a single 20ga, no blood in the room and a spinal that should have wore off 15 mintues ago. All true stories from just this past month.