[boas]

Interventional radiologist here. The short answer is "no." I personally perform more than 100 different types of procedures, but there are lots of variations of each procedure, and different techniques for performing the same procedure. (And you need to know what to do when something unexpected happens in the middle of a procedure)

There are thousands of CPT codes, and even more procedures, since one CPT code could describe multiple different procedures, and some procedures involve combining multiple CPT codes. There is no formal approval process for new surgical procedures, and there is no comprehensive list. New procedures are invented all the time.

Your best bet is to pick a specific area, then find a surgeon to shadow. A lot of details of surgical techniques are not written down anywhere, and you learn by working with other surgeons. There are a few books that go through the basic procedural details. For example, Zollinger's "Atlas of surgical operations" is a good reference for abdominal surgery, and Kandarpa's "Handbook of interventional radiologic procedures" is a good reference for interventional radiology procedures. "Biodesign" by Zenios is a good introduction to inventing new medical devices.

[dataangel]

How can there be no formal approval process for surgical procedures? This drives me crazy. Surgical procedures should have a high evidence standard just like drugs. Otherwise how can a patient be confident in the science?

[voakbasda]

My father was a neurosurgeon. Sorry to burst your bubble, but when you go to someone like him, it is not called medical science. It is medical practice.

The medical industry does not provide the information required to be confident in your personal outcome. At best they can provide statistics about populations. On an individual basis, it is an absolute crap shoot.

[scyzoryk_xyz]

I think you can relax - because there is a very high evidence standard in surgery. It’s just not regulated in that traditional sense because there are way too many variations and caveats to everything. There are a million niches and each one is occupied by a tiny group of specialists who know everything about theirs. I know this because I’ve been to their conferences and they invest a lot of energy into collecting statistics, verifying hypotheses, trying out subtle improvements etc. And then they argue for ever and ever about which approach delivers an ever so slight advantage or improvement.

[dataangel]

There was a study out of the UK on here recently that seems to indicate most Orthopedic surgeries are worse than no surgery. So I'm very not relaxed :)

[scyzoryk_xyz]

I don’t think orthopedic surgery is a very good representative for all surgery ;)

[JabavuAdams]

Thanks, I did have the sense that it would be impossible to formalize all the variations. So, perhaps I should not have written "exhaustive". I just would like something more complete than my initial searches revealed.

I think that, yes, eventually we will need to have the robot surgeons watch operations and listen to / question human surgeons. The problem is that we're not really able to have a robust teaching / learning conversation and show/tell with and AI yet.