SEVEN DEADLY SURGERIES

Top-seven most dangerous and deadly surgeries…

For this new study, researchers at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Medical Center in Boston analyzed data for 421,476 emergency surgeries performed in the U.S. between 2008 and 2011. The patients in the study ranged in age from 18 to 105 years.
It turns out, the top-seven most common emergency surgeries accounted for 80 percent of all deaths, complications and costs.
Here is the shocking list in alphabetical order. In parentheses is the surgery’s complication rate/death rate.

1. Appendectomy (7 percent/0.1 percent)
2. Partial removal of the small intestines (47 percent/6 percent)
3. Partial removal of the colon (43 percent/5 percent)
4. Gall bladder removal (8 percent/0.2 percent)
5. Removal of abdominal adhesions (28 percent/2 percent)
6. Operations for peptic ulcers (42 percent/7 percent)
7. Laparotomies — a surgical procedure during which a doctor inserts a camera into the abdomen to find a diagnosis and/or treatment (40 percent/24 percent)

The complications caused by these surgeries include virtually every medical problem you don’t want to have: acute renal injury, acute respiratory distress, bleeding, cardiac arrest, deep vein thrombosis, and pulmonary embolism (blood clots in the lungs), heart attack, infection, sepsis, septic shock, stroke, wound failure, and other horrors.
So what can you do?
Unfortunately, you don’t have many options when you have a seriously inflamed or infected appendix or gall bladder that requires emergency surgery. As you get older, signs of appendicitis become more subtle. So doctors must be on the look-out.
In my consulting forensic medical practice, I had a case where an otherwise healthy Vietnam veteran in his 50s lingered in a VA Hospital for a week, where they did every medical test in the book, except examining him for appendicitis, at which point he finally died. Fortunately, compared to the other surgeries on the list, emergency removal of the appendix or gall bladder causes far fewer overall complications and deaths. Plus, surgical removal of these tissues is an important advance in the history of medicine over the past century.
As a side note, having your gall bladder removed doesn’t mean you won’t be able to digest fats going forward. The liver still produces and secretes the bile acids needed to properly digest fats, which you need in your diet. The ability to store extra bile acids in the gall bladder was probably an adaptation to a “feast or famine” type of subsistence, which is no longer relevant (or should not be!) in our modern diet.
Of course, many surgeons consider the appendix a “disposable” organ. So in our medical arrogance, scientists haven’t studied this organ for about a century.
In my view, the appendix DOES have an important role in the immune system of the GI tract. And there are more immune cells in the gastro-intestinal tract than anywhere else in the body. But perhaps, like the thymus gland in the chest, the appendix plays a more important role during childhood for the development of the immune system than in older adulthood.

Source:
“Use of National Burden to Define Operative Emergency General Surgery,” JAMA Surgery 

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