The Most Important Question To Ask Before Surgery

According to researchers at the University of Michigan who studied the case files of 460,738 patients who underwent eight types of surgical procedures, the most important question you can ask your surgeon is how many times he or she has actually performed the procedure.

Experience Counts - Not Age

The statistics found within the case files, which were published in the Annals of Surgery, indicate that a surgeon's case load of procedures is a better predictor of surgical skills than his or her age is... which seems to make a lot of sense to me. They noted that surgeons over 60 years of age who had high case loads had the same low patient mortality rates as high case load doctors in their forties. Conversely both age groups had similar mortality rates that were higher when the doctors in question had lower case load histories.

Now my opinion on this is that this is probably an obvious deduction that just about anyone could make, however, I would assume that many people probably never think to ask this question either out of a desire to show respect to the surgeon or out of the simple fact that they didn't know to ask. I personally don't have any upcoming surgeries but I'm sure I would rather have someone cut into me knowing that he or she had dome it many times before. Just something to think about.

Your Opinion

Is this a question you would ask of your surgeon? Leave your comments below and thanks for reading!

Source
Annals Of Surgery, Sept. 2006
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