What an outrage!

[governaitor]

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I just saw a show on the discovery health channel. They kept on referring to surgeons as "doctors" and then referred to pathologists as "technicians".

Don't they know it is just the other way around? Surgeons are highly skilled technicians trained to get tissue into our hands so we can tell the patient what is really going on!

 

[yaah]

The public has no clue. Short attention spans. I used to be bothered more about this, then I started realizing that this public is the same group of people who keep all these reality tv shows popular, make Oprah a billionaire, and can't figure out how to vote when they go into a booth (or, alternatively, figure out how to make voting an easier process, depending on your political bent), if they vote at all, which is unlikely because they would rather do something else.

So I guess this means that the pathologists who aren't "technicians" are crime scene investigators or Jack Kevorkian. That's right, continue to underestimate us.

Sigh. Other doctors know we are important. If the public wants to glamorize another field, let them.

I wonder if these same people know that PAs do a lot of surgery these days.

 

[deschutes]

Coming right down to it, it's not as if the public knows what a doctor's work is actually like anyway. One unenlightened scriptwriter = one inaccurate documentary. Silly them. Will it change a whole lot of perceptions? Don't think so. We certainly didn't go/aren't going into this field for the glamour of it 😛

 

[Molly Maquire]

I think I just saw the same episode. Was it the one with the 200-lb NF tumor?

 

[gungho]

The public has no clue. Short attention spans. I used to be bothered more about this, then I started realizing that this public is the same group of people who keep all these reality tv shows popular, make Oprah a billionaire, and can't figure out how to vote when they go into a booth (or, alternatively, figure out how to make voting an easier process, depending on your political bent), if they vote at all, which is unlikely because they would rather do something else.

So I guess this means that the pathologists who aren't "technicians" are crime scene investigators or Jack Kevorkian. That's right, continue to underestimate us.

Sigh. Other doctors know we are important. If the public wants to glamorize another field, let them.

I wonder if these same people know that PAs do a lot of surgery these days.

What specifically do you mean by "PAs do a lot of surgery these days"?

 

[b&ierstiefel]

I think that at some smaller hospitals, PA's can do some simple surgeries and procedures. Surgery is kind of a loose term in that sense; one can be talking about excision of sebaceous cysts or AAA repairs. Now you've got me all curious as to what kind of surgeries PA's can do. What are the limits?

 

[yaah]

At some institutions, PAs will do a lot of the opening and closing in operations. Per what I heard from a couple of residents on surgery months, the attending may not even come into the room in some heart surgery cases until the chest is open and ready for bypass. PAs do vein harvests, lots of procedures like lines and chest tubes. Of course, the attending still has the responsibility. I don't think there are any surgeries where PAs do everything start to finish, clearly. But they do a lot of the standard, technical work.

There's a new hospital show coming out, apparently, on FOX. I imagine it will be quite realistic and have true to life situations. 🙄

 

[gungho]

At some institutions, PAs will do a lot of the opening and closing in operations. Per what I heard from a couple of residents on surgery months, the attending may not even come into the room in some heart surgery cases until the chest is open and ready for bypass. PAs do vein harvests, lots of procedures like lines and chest tubes. Of course, the attending still has the responsibility. I don't think there are any surgeries where PAs do everything start to finish, clearly. But they do a lot of the standard, technical work.

There's a new hospital show coming out, apparently, on FOX. I imagine it will be quite realistic and have true to life situations. 🙄

Yeah, that's what I thought you meant. I'm not aware of anywhere that the PA is the surgeon of record-can't imagine an insurer covering them. Just wanted to make sure so someone else reading this forum didn't get the wrong idea about several things.

 

[governaitor]

I think I just saw the same episode. Was it the one with the 200-lb NF tumor?

That's the one

 

[Doctor B.]

At my med school, the cardiovascular surgeons always had a PA open, harvest the vein while the surgeon worked on the heart and then close.