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Comment by djmips | Hacker News Reader

I kind of feel the same thing happened to me a long time ago when I broke my ankle, the entire time I was attended to by a orthopedic surgeon and it was made out as if he was the surgeon who would operate, however my surgery was done by an intern / student. I was only aware of this because I was semi conscious despite being under full anesthesia. Afterwards the surgeon followed up. I never made any waves and I guess it turned out OK and I'm grateful for the repair but it was kind of bait and switch.

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A student or intern (first-year resident) doing your surgery in orthopedics would be pretty shocking. If that’s really the case you should be upset.

In teaching hospitals in the US, orthopedics is a 5 year residency (after 4 years of med school). Technically residents are in training but they are MDs.

Oftentimes (again in teaching hospitals) attending surgeons (the person whose clinic you went to) might “run two rooms” in parallel. Usually because there is a lot of prep time, anesthesia time, etc so they offset patients allowing them to tackle more cases in a day.

To the general public this sounds super horrible but in practice you were likely operated on by a 4th or 5th year training, ie someone with 12 years of medical training if you include premed undergrad. And the attending was likely in the room and maybe even did the hard bits of the surgery.

It’s a tricky balance because running two rooms ultimately may keep costs down (more productive, etc) and can provide more opportunities to train the next generation of surgeons.

Source: family in orthopedics.

Well I understand that new surgeons don't come out of nowhere, everyone is green at some point so I understand the basis for this but I guess I would have appreciated the heads up prior.

Was the orthopedic surgeon present in the operating room? If so then he basically did perform the surgery, even if the hands-on work was done by other members of the surgical team. If the surgeon wasn't present at all, and didn't make that clear during the pre-op consultation, then that would seem unethical.

nonsense.

there is a world of difference between someone that does the procedure 50-100x/year, vs someone that does it 2x/year.

experienced surgeons operate faster. lower blood loss. no unnecessary trauma. less inflammation. less swelling, faster recovery, fewer side effects.

>experienced surgeons operate faster. lower blood loss. no unnecessary trauma. less inflammation. less swelling, faster recovery, fewer side effects.

Whether these relative differences add up to anything that matters depend a hell of a lot on the surgery in question and how good the "experienced surgeon" is in the first place.

Agree, and at some point you have to let the inexperienced surgeon operate or in 20 years there will be no experienced surgeons. Not to mention the "inexperienced" guy has been doing it for 4 years.

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