If you’ve ever seen an old movie about surgeons there’s a good chance theres a scene where the great surgeon performs a hair-trigger procedure while other doctors watch with interest from rows of seats overlooking the operating table. There was a similar scene in the Seinfeld “Junior Mint” episode.
My question is simple. IRL, how can the spectator really see what the surgeon’s doing? It seems like the action of the operation is too small-scale and too far away to really see what the surgeon’s doing. Or is the point really to observe how the surgeon runs the operation and directs the nurses and the anesthesiologist, rather than to see what he/she actually does?
I ANA MD, but in teaching hospitals the surgeon is often doing more than performing the operation. The surgeon is providing a running commentary about the surgery – the order things are done, what to look for, what you might find that would necessitate a change in the original plan, what to do under different circumstances should they arise. I have wiynessed this at the hospital where I work (not in a medical capacity). It’s more about passing on knowleddge and analytical thinking than technique.
And these daya with new imaging technologies the observers can very often see almost exactly what the surgeon does through video distribution, A great deal of surgery is done without the surgeon ever directly seeing the work. A camera is inserted through one or two small incisions, and the instruments through others, and the surgeon operates by camera, which can be sent (along with the audio portion) all over the hospital – or the world for that matter. So these theaters may be disappearing in the near future from more modern medical environments.