Splenomegaly
Jaundice
nausea/vomiting
Inflammatory bowel disease
The thing is, in most situations, surgeons come in after a lot of medical treatment has failed, so ideally the treatment algorithms should be the same. I mean, if we're practicing evidence based medicine, we should all be working off the same evidence, right?
However, I just read a chapter in my surgery textbook about the spleen, and it went into a great deal of detail about the kinds of splenic problems where splenectomy is the treatment of choice, whereas I don't remember my medicine textbook EVER suggesting splenectomy as the ideal treatment for anything.
For jaundice, the discussion could be about causes needing medical therapy vs. those needing surgery.
For nausea/vomiting, you could talk about the signs and symptoms that send a patient to the surgeons vs. those that send someone to the medicine service.
CAD is a good suggestion too. Although there you get into the issue of medical management vs. PTCA by interventional cardiology (a medicine subspecialty) vs. CABG by cardiothoracic surgery. And the balance of evidence is tipping toward PTCA if intervention is needed, except in some defined situations--triple vessel disease being one of them. So I don't know how much of a debate you'll get out of that unless you have die-hards on the CT surgery side.
Something you might do is ask faculty in your medicine and surgery departments for ideas. They'd probably have some good ideas.
