A surgery rotation as a medical student is nothing like being a surgical resident, nor being an attending. Unlike many aspects of medicine, surgery cannot be learned from a book. Instead, one is slowly mentored through the process in a one-on-one relationship with your attendings. When I was a medical student, I, too, wished I could do a "simple" lap chole, instead of watching it on the screen. Looking back now, I ddn't realize just how much was going on around me. In your medicine rotation, there will be lengthy discussions about the merits/risks of different approaches to a patients management - the same type of decisions are made each minute in the OR (which, BTW, a minute in the OR costs ~$80 to the patient), albeit without many of the lengthy discussions.. - Which pre-op antibiotics do you want? Any steroids? How would you like the tube positioned? Body draped? Where will your incision be? How big will your incision be? Cautery settings? Monopolar or bipolar? Which instruments for this type of a procedure? Will we need frozen sections? What to do when the frozen sections come back? Should we take only half the thyroid or a complete thyroidectomy? Did you find those parathyroids? What type of suture do you want to close with? How do you want to close? Where to send the patient postoperatively? To the floor? Unit? What tests will we need tonight? Tomorrow? How do you want your drains managed? Postop antibiotics? Etc, etc, etc.
No, surgery is not just some highly technical thing for some "simple boring problem." Unfortunately, as a student you really don't get a true feel of what it is all about - until you get there as a resident. There is as much, if not more, decision making that occurs before and after the OR, as occurs in the OR. I wish that we could involve students more in the OR, but reality makes that not possible. When we are closing the neck on a 19 y old female with a thyroid mass, I am sure she does not what the student doing it for the first time - And I can assure you she wants a student no-where near her recurrent laryngeal nerve. When we can - we try to include students as 1st assistants. Routinely, we let sub-I's do trachs, laryngoscopies, etc.
I know that not everyone wants to go into surgery, just as not everyone wants to go into Medicine, Peds, Radiology, Anesthesia, etc. What is important, however, is that as a student you get an appreciation for what each service can offer your patients, and that you learn some basic patient management skills along the way.
At my hospital, every patient with chest pain gets the same work-up - with the goal of <2 hrs to revascularization for a coronary blockage - yet I do insult cardiologists by telling they are following a "highly technical procedure to solve a simple boring problem."
Good luck with the rest of your studies and rotations.
