Unbounded Medicine

Like those nice posts of Kidney Notes called Hilarious Journal Articles I have read in the September issue of Annals of Surgery an article wich concludes the following:

For some complex procedures, surgeons older than 60 years, particularly those with low procedure volumes, have higher operative mortality rates than their younger counterparts. For most procedures, however, surgeon age is not an important predictor of operative risk.

In this study, it was used the national Medicare files examining operative mortality in 461,000 procedures. There were three groups of surgeons age 40 years and less, 41 to 50 years, 51 to 60 years, and 61 years and more.

The complex procedures were: esophagectomy, cystectomy, lung resection, aortic valve replacement and aortic aneurysm repair.

Less experienced surgeons (those of 40 years and less) had comparable mortality rates to surgeons aged 41 to 50 years for all procedures. So, why everyone call them unexperienced?