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Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

I think it depends on the surgery. Farmers neuter their own pigs and cattle all the time which is a type of surgery.

My daughter had brain surgery and we found the actual medical paper describing how to perform the procedure. It’s basically 6 sentences long. Cut here, make an incision, use a tool there. All while being sure not to accidentally sever an infant’s spine and make them a quadriplegic. The actual instructions were simple enough that I could understand perfectly well how to do the procedure based on the document. However, I’m sure if I actually attempted the surgery I’d be a nervous wreck. I’d guess confidence is probably another part. But maybe a doctor will chime in.

I just tried to find the paper but am not sure where we dug it up or I’d just post it here.

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My fiance does a lot of abdominal surgeries, including robotic. There are a handful that are "difficult" in the traditional sense - lots of complicated steps, indications and contraindications for different methods to complete the same task, etc - but by-and-large most of them are following a set of prescribed steps. For her, because the surgeries are abdominal, a lot of the difficulty comes in when dealing with patients of larger weight and/or who have had lots of previous procedures. A surgery that takes 45 minutes on a 110-pound 17 year old with no major medical history can easily take 4 hours or more for a 400-pound woman with multiple c-sections and multiple other surgeries. Scar tissue distorts the anatomy, it's just physically more difficult to move past outer layers, etc.

I imagine the trained surgeon knows what to do when anything goes wrong following those 6 simple instructions, and from thence flows confidence.

Exactly. Wife is a neurosurgeon, and somewhere towards the end of her sixth year of residency, she had the gradual realization that she could handle anything that might happen in the course of an even semi-normal case. That fluency has continued to build since then, of course.

Any beginning woodworker quickly learns how much of the job is not just making a straight cut but juggling a whole ton of shit you didn't think about.

And that's all without getting into things like how much of a grace period you have between the first cut and the last fastener, which you don't have with a living organism.

I think a lot of it is the knowledge of the rest of the body and the ability to adapt when something doesn't go exactly according to plan.

barber chirurgeons

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