ARE LEFT HANDED SURGEONS LEFT OUT?

Being a left-handed surgeon, more specifically a left-handed ENT surgeon, presents a unique pattern of difficulties.This article is an overview of left-handedness and a personal account of the specific difficulties a left-handed ENT surgeon faces. 

Surgeon Speaks

Patients who undergo liver transplantation go from being very sick to reclaiming their lives. It’s a rapid and rewarding transformation. The notion that there are still places in the world where this surgery isn’t available is a problem. No one should die of liver disease because of lack of funding. The city of Santa Cruz has surgeons who operate every day. They want to learn how to do liver transplants, but there wasn’t anyone to teach them. It’s an honor to work to help change that. While our work in Bolivia may not be solving the problem globally, it is making a difference for the physicians and patients there. As surgeons, we don’t often think about our skills not being readily available in other countries. Based on our experiences in Santa Cruz, we encourage other surgeons to be open to volunteer opportunities. Warren R. Maley, MD Professor of Surgery Director, Live Donor Liver Transplant Program Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University Stephen P. Dunn, MD, FACS Professor of Surgery Chief, Division of Pediatric Solid Organ Transplantation Nemours/Alfred I. DuPont Hospital for Childre

Comparison of Visual Analog Pain Score Reported to Physician vs Nurse in Nonoperatively Treated Foot and Ankle Patients

Background: Patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) are taking a more prominent role in Orthopedics as health care seeks to define treatment outcomes. The Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) is considered a reliable measure of acute pain. A previous study found that operative candidates’ VAS pain score was significantly higher when reported to the surgeon compared to the nurse. This study’s aim is to examine whether this phenomenon occurs in nonoperative patients. We hypothesize that patients’ VAS scores reported to the surgeon and a nurse will be the same Methods: This study is a retrospective cohort of 201 consecutive nonoperative patients treated by a single surgeon. Patients were asked to rate pain intensity by a nurse followed by the surgeon using a horizontal VAS, 0 “no pain” to 10 worst pain”. Differences in reported pain levels were compared with data from the previous cohort of 201 consecutive operative patients. Results: The mean VAS score reported to the nurse was 3.2 whereas the mean VAS score reported to the surgeon was 4.2 (p\u3c.001). The mean difference in VAS scores reported for operative patients was 2.9, whereas the mean difference for nonoperative patients was 1.0 (p \u3c .001). Conclusion: This study found statistically significant differences between VAS scores reported to the surgeon versus the nurse in nonoperative patients which support the trend found in our previous study, where operative patients reported significantly higher scores to the surgeon. The mean difference between reported pain scores is significantly higher for operative patients compared to nonoperative patients

The TechniCom Challenge: Low Fidelity Simulation with High Yield Potential

Participants work in teams of two. One member of the team serves as the “communicator”, the other serves as the “surgeon”. The “communicator” is given a picture of the design and instructs the surgeon how to use the materials inside the box trainer to replicate the design. The “communicator” cannot look inside the box trainer nor share with the “surgeon” the picture of the design. Several designs may be incorporated into the exercise. Pairs are given a maximum time of five minutes to complete each design. A debriefing is conducted to discuss the challenges in completing the simulation

Patient Attitudes Toward a Physician Led Radiology Review: Improved Understanding of Medical Conditions and a Potential New Quality Metric

Objectives: We were interested in understanding patient perspectives regarding the importance of reviewing their imaging studies with a surgeon. Specific Aims: 1. What value do patients place on viewing their imaging? 2. Do patients have a better understanding of their disease and planned operation after a surgeon led review of imaging studies? 3. Do patients find viewing images an accessible educational tool?https://jdc.jefferson.edu/patientsafetyposters/1022/thumbnail.jp

Computational medical imaging for total knee arthroplasty using visualitzation toolkit

This project is presented as a Master Thesis in the field of Civil Engineering, Biomedical specialization. As the project of an Erasmus exchange student, this thesis has been under supervision both the Universite Livre de Bruxelles and the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. The purpose of this thesis to put in practice all the knowledges acquired during this Master in Industrial Engineering in UPC and to be a support for medical staff in total knee arthoplasty procedures. Prof. Emmanuel Thienpont has been working for years as orthopaedic surgeon at the Hospital Sant Luc, Brussels. His years of work and research have been mainly focused on Total Knee Arthroplasty or TKA. During one of the most important steps of this procedure, the orthopaedic surgeon has to cut the head of the femur following two perpendicular cutting planes. Nevertheless, the orientation of these planes are directly dependant of the femur constitution. This Master Thesis has been conceived in order to offer the surgeon a tool to determine the proper direction planes in a previous step before the surgical procedure. This project pretends to give the surgeon an openfree computational platform to access to patient geometrical and physiological information before involving the subject in any invasive procedure

Surgeon Speaks

Like every surgeon, I started my residency training in General Surgery. Then I specialized in Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery and finally sub-specialized with a Fellowship in Heart and Lung Transplantation and Adult Cardiac Surgery at Duke University Medical Center. At the time I went through training, we didn’t have a lot of good options to help patients with advanced heart failure. I was working with very sick patients, many of whom died. Back then, many of my colleagues questioned why I would choose this as my focus. They were right that the treatments weren’t great at the time. But over the past 25 years or so, I have not only witnessed but also been part of incredible innovations. Today, we have some excellent solutions and we’ve made a huge impact. It’s incredible both to look back at our progress and to look ahead and imagine how much more we can achieve. H. Todd Massey, MD Surgical Director, Cardiac Transplantation and Mechanical Circulatory Support Professor, Cardiothoracic Surger

The Word-Surgeon\u27s Compendium

For years, logophiles have amused themselves by converting one word to another by various processes. Herein is an effort to bring some degree of order to this brand of wordplay

The Supply of Surgeons and the Demand for Operations

This paper presents a multi-equation multivariate analysis of differences in the supply of surgeons and the demand for operations across geographical areas of the United States in 1963 and 1970. The results provide considerable support for the hypothesis that surgeons shift the demand for operations. Other things equal, a 10 percent increase in the surgeon/population ratio results in about a 3 percent increase in per capita utilization. Moreover, differences in supply seem to have a perverse effect on fees, raising them when the surgeon/population ratio increases. Surgeon supply is in part determined by factors unrelated to demand, especially by the attractiveness of the area as a place to live.

The Use of Audio in Minimal Access Surgery

In minimal access surgery (MAS) (also known as minimally invasive surgery), operations are carried out by making small incisions in the skin and inserting special apparatus into potential body cavities through those incisions. Laparoscopic MAS procedures are conducted in the patient’s abdomen. The aim of MAS is faster recovery, shorter hospitalisation and fewer major post-operative complications; all resulting in lower societal cost with better patient acceptability. The technique is markedly dependent on supporting technologies for vision, instrumentation, energy delivery, anaesthesia, and monitoring. However, in practice, much MAS continues to take longer and be associated with an undesirable frequency of unwanted minor (or occasionally major) mishaps. Many of these difficulties result precisely from the complexity and mal-adaptation of the additional technology and from lack of familiarity with it. A survey of South East England surgeons showed the two main stress factors on surgeons to be the technical difficulty of the procedure and time pressures placed on the surgeon by third parties. Many of the problems associated with MAS operations are linked to the control and monitoring of the equipment. This paper describes work begun to explore ergonomic enhancements to laparoscopic operating technology that could result in faster and safer laparoscopic operations, less surgeon stress and reduce dependence on ancillary staff. Auditory displays have been used to communicate complex information to users in a modality that is complementary to the visual channel. This paper proposes the development of a control and feedback system that will make use of auditory displays to improve the amount of information that can be communicated to the surgeon and his assistant without overloading the visual channel. Control of the system would be enhanced by the addition of voice input to allow the surgeon direct control