[scottbruin]

A student or intern (first-year resident) doing your surgery in orthopedics would be pretty shocking. If that’s really the case you should be upset.

In teaching hospitals in the US, orthopedics is a 5 year residency (after 4 years of med school). Technically residents are in training but they are MDs.

Oftentimes (again in teaching hospitals) attending surgeons (the person whose clinic you went to) might “run two rooms” in parallel. Usually because there is a lot of prep time, anesthesia time, etc so they offset patients allowing them to tackle more cases in a day.

To the general public this sounds super horrible but in practice you were likely operated on by a 4th or 5th year training, ie someone with 12 years of medical training if you include premed undergrad. And the attending was likely in the room and maybe even did the hard bits of the surgery.

It’s a tricky balance because running two rooms ultimately may keep costs down (more productive, etc) and can provide more opportunities to train the next generation of surgeons.

Source: family in orthopedics.

[djmips]

Well I understand that new surgeons don't come out of nowhere, everyone is green at some point so I understand the basis for this but I guess I would have appreciated the heads up prior.