YSK that if you go to the best of the best surgical center you may not even be operated on by the ‘best of the best’.

Residents are licensed to practice for training, not on their own. I have no issue with residents doing surgery - there’s no way to get good at surgery except to perform and practice and learn surgery.

The issue that this comes into play is when residents are doing this completely unsupervised. There are parts of the case that aren’t critical or are just simple - such as opening and closing during surgery - that you don’t need to be a full-fledged neurosurgeon to do.

However, it’s unreasonable that residents that have been practicing for as little as 3 years are removing complete brain tumors by themselves, with no attending surgeon in sight, and will only show up for 5 minutes to check on them. Especially when patients are not explained this thoroughly, and are expecting to be operated on by the attending surgeon.

/r/YouShouldKnow Thread Parent