Dr. Joshua John-Ram Schacter discusses surgical risks and the limits of even excellent hospital systems, noting that decreased overall patient health contributes to painful, debilitating postoperative complications. He proposes helping patients improve their health preoperatively — potentially avoiding surgery — and frames surgery as the end of a spectrum of care rather than the default first option.
Surgery is not without its risk. We do have a very safe surgical system here in the United States, from a perspective of we don't lose a lot of patients, and we're always in the orthopedic center of Excellence. We're always striving to improve our surgical outcomes. That is number one goal. And I will say in defense of hospital systems, that my hospital system is 100% on board with anything to make surgery safer or better. But even in the best situation, we have patients who have painful and debilitating complications. And there's several reasons why that happens. Overall health is decreased. And so that got me thinking. Well, if we're doing too many surgeries on patients who really aren't healthy enough, then maybe we can start to offer to help patients get healthier and maybe even avoid doing a surgery altogether. With surgery as sort of at the end of a spectrum of care.
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