"The enemy of good is better". True, but the other enemy of good is "not good enough".
This is primarily a semantic distinction, of no real consequence, but I'm going to speak in defense of perfectionism here, and take the liberty of speaking on behalf of OP.
Too perfect depends on the case. If you're closing the abdomen on an unstable trauma case, you shouldn't waste time on a doing a perfect cosmetic skin closure. But if you're doing a cardiac bypass, or a microsurgery anastamosis, or a cosmetic case ( whether plastic surgery or dental ) perfection is essential to the case and goes with the territory.
These are the guys doing 3 hour routine lap choles, 7 hour melanoma excisions, 12 hour esophagectomies. I had the displeasure of doing the last during training with a surgical oncologist who simply could not be satisfied with each step of the operation before moving on. Its not good for the patient (or the junior resident; fortunately as a Chief resident I had the support I needed to refuse to cover his cases).
Oh, yeah, I trained under some guys like that. I could tell you some great stories, but I'll be typing all day. I will say that the worst surgeon I worked with wasn't the slow, bumbling one. It was the super fast excellent technician who did his cases just a little faster than he was capable of doing them. But I digress..
Someone who takes 3 hours for a gallbladder every time is not a perfectionist, although that may be what he thinks. He's just not a good surgeon, most likely because he lacks the confidence to move on. He's just not cut out for surgery.
Perfection doesn't require more time, it just takes the proper amount of time. Doing it perfectly can be done fast, it just needs to be done right. All surgeons are perfectionists. I don't think that any one surgical specialty requires more perfection than any other. Hemostasis always has to be perfect, or you'll be back. The bowel anastamosis has to be perfect. Not pretty, necessarily, but perfect, i.e. sealed. No leak.
Perhaps it's that some surgeons want the challenge of having to be perfect on a finer scale: No just a perfect bowel anstamosis with 4-0 silk ( yes, I know , you staple. I'm taking some poetic license ) but maybe a perfect fem-pop with 6-0 prolene, or a finger replant with 10-0 nylon, or a cornea repair with 11-0.
In dentistry, or oral surgery, there's a functional component as well, and that is a poor bite. If the filling isn't perfect, or the mandible fracture reduction isn't perfect, the patient will know it. They will be miserable. If the color on a veneer is off, everyone sees it. The reward, though, as the dentist, is that when it's right, you get to admire it. (My dentist loves admiring the chip he repaired on my front upper incisor,every time I come in for a cleaning ) That's another feature, I think, of some "perfectionist" specialties. You get to admire your work. In ortho, you get to admire the fracture reduction. Orthopods love to show off their xrays, just like plastic surgeons enjoy their before-and-after pictures. But in ortho, if a fracture is slightly off, sometimes the consequences are insignificant. Not so in dentistry or oral surgery. The patient will be miserable if the bite isn't perfect, every single time. On the other hand, general surgeons don't get to admire their bowel anastamoses, except to the extent that their patients aren't septic. Barium enemas just aren't as pretty to look at.
I trained under one guy, a great surgeon, but a bit prickly. He would leave me to close, and when he came back in to check , he would ask how it was going. The first few times I made the mistake of saying "pretty good". He would say"take out all the sutures and start over. We're not "pretty good surgeons. We're better than that". He did that to all the residents. But he was right. We always did it better the second time around. And you know, when it really was perfect, we didn't say it was "pretty good". We said, "it's great".
