Talk:Trauma surgery
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[edit] "Unoperative in nature" ?
The last sentence reads:
- "As trauma surgery has increasingly become unoperative in nature, its popularity amongst medical students has fallen drastically."
What does "unoperative in nature" mean? That one can't operate on the patients? Did trauma surgery used to be "operative"? Why did it change? -- noosphere 08:04, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
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- "Unoperative" simply means that trauma surgeons don't get to operate as much as other surgical specialties. At one point trauma surgeons were very useful, particularly in the military, where you'd have patients presenting with all sorts of injury. A single surgeon who could treat many different injuries was obviously very useful. However, in civilian health care a trauma surgeon’s job is to merely stabilize the patient (keep the patient alive), preferably not actually fix the injury until a specialist arrives, and unfortunately in many cases "stabilization" simply does not involve any kind of surgery.
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- In medicine there is a joke that the trauma surgeon merely baby-sits the patient until the real specialist arrives. This is especially evident in big city hospitals, where the hospital would really prefer the patient to be treated by a specialist surgeon; neurosurgeon, vascular surgeon, orthopedic surgeon, etc. and not a trauma surgeon. However, on busy days or when a specialist is unavailable, a trauma surgeon will perform general surgery procedures; an emergency tracheotomy or appendectomy for example (sometimes much more difficult procedures). So yes, trauma surgeons do get to operate sometimes, just not as much as they used to, especially in civilian health care. I’m not sure whether trauma surgeons are still used in the military. --71.112.146.27 02:46, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
