Surgery: Medical School Crash Course

Preface This course is designed to help doctors and other professionals considering surgery as a medical specialty to learn the basic principles of general and trauma surgery and the wide variety of surgical interventions a surgeon performs. Surgeons are at the forefront of the management of several different medical problems that may range from the excision of benign disease, to performing complex cancer surgery, to the emergency management of trauma patients and critically ill patients. The first chapter of this course will include a discussion of basic surgical principles. Surgery can be done under local anesthesia, general anesthesia, regional anesthesia, or neuraxial anesthesia. The surgeon must work closely with the anesthesiologist to provide informed consent to the patient and to perform surgery to the best of their ability, bearing in mind that complications can always occur. Surgical principles and surgical complications will be highlighted in this chapter. The second chapter of the course will be primarily devoted to perioperative management of surgical patients. This involves the perioperative imaging and laboratory testing necessary to help decide the patients surgical risk and to determine the best course of action in any given surgery. General surgeons and trauma surgeons must care for the multiply traumatized patient who needs urgent surgery and subsequent critical care management so this will be part of the discussions held in this course. This is the focus of the third chapter of the course. The fourth chapter of the course is entirely designed to be a discussion of transplant surgery and the complex immunological mechanisms that go into accepting or rejecting an organ or tissue graft. Transplants of several types will be highlighted as well as why some transplants are successful and some transplants aren’t. Surgical oncology will be the focus of the fifth chapter of the course. Surgeons care for most types of cancer patients and work as part of a multidisciplinary team that employs neoadjuvant therapy, surgery, and adjuvant therapy to patients with a variety of cancers. The sixth chapter of the course will be primarily devoted to a discussion of head and neck surgery. This type of surgery can be done by oral and maxillofacial surgeons, general surgeons, ophthalmologists, and neurosurgeons. There are unique anesthesia problems and challenges in head and neck surgery that will be included in the discussions in this chapter. The seventh chapter of this course will be focused on the treatment of breast surgery. Both cancer surgery on breast cancer patients will be discussed as well as reconstructive breast surgery, which is offered to many patients with breast conserving treatment that results in a poor cosmetic outcome and in patients who have a mastectomy. Endocrine surgery will be the focus of the eighth chapter of the course. The patient with endocrine problems can need several kinds of surgery but thyroid surgery, pituitary surgery, and adrenal surgery are the most common endocrine surgeries so these will be the main focus of the chapter.