BLOG: Preserving surgical athletes

ByJohn A. Hovanesian, MD, FACS

We eye surgeons collectively possess a pool of skills that are both rare and not easily renewable with physicians to replace us. The declining number in our profession combined with the increasing demand from a growing aging patient population mean that our surgical skills and our ability to use them deserve our best efforts to preserve and protect. Our health care system serves patients best when surgeons with the highest success rates are accessible to patients and enabled to perform as many procedures as possible for as many years as possible.

How do we keep good surgeons operating? Elite professional athletes preserve their rare skills and prolong their careers with a few common strategies that surgeons would do well to adopt. Let’s explore them.

A support system of trainers and coaches who take the long view of the player’s well-being help elite athletes stay on the field. They prescribe regular, reasonably paced physical training. For us, taking time to attend meetings, learn new techniques and adopt new technologies makes us better servants to our patients, equipped with the tools to better handle surgical challenges.

Protective equipment promotes proper body positioning and shields muscles, bones and joints from undue strain or injury. Similarly, every part of our physical work environment, both in the office and the OR, deserves review from an ergonomics perspective, as we discuss in the cover story of this issue of OSN. For surgeons too, exercise helps maintain our flexibility, muscle mass and bone density — all essential elements of preventing stress injuries; a non-exercising surgeon can hardly expect a long career.

Psychological support is a priority for elite athletes to maintain a “level head” for high career satisfaction and harmony with their teams. For surgeons, the expressions of gratitude from our patients provide all the affirmation we need of the importance and impact of our work. But we don’t always listen. Instead we often focus on the few who complain or the problems in our practice environment that we can’t fix. Practicing gratitude and mindfulness is common to every highly successful surgeon I know.

A high income permits athletes to perform their duties unencumbered by worries about finances. It motivates younger athletes to persist on the long, rejection-prone road to the big leagues, and it continues to reward those who take care to preserve their careers when they become established. For the very same reason, a first-rate health care system should provide a high income to capable surgeons.

An off-season gives elite athletes a chance to recharge, take vacation and enjoy a fulfilling family life. I know a few incredibly skilled surgeons with long careers who have worked 52 weeks a year, but the happiest, most balanced practitioners I know don’t mind taking long vacations, and they squeeze in a few more patients during their working weeks to meet their production numbers.

Devotion to a higher cause is a common theme among sports’ most respected names. Whether this means practicing and evangelizing their religious faith or performing nonprofit work, many would like to be remembered not for their athletic gifts but for the gifts they have voluntarily given the world. Similarly, many of the most energetic surgeons you will meet spend all their free time in the service of others.

Some have proposed that we can meet the growing demand for capable surgeons by training non-physicians to perform common procedures. Like many others, I believe this is a mistake. Our patients deserve surgeons who have both dexterity and the strongest fund of knowledge possible to handle not just the easiest cases but the complicated ones as well. This requires not just a full medical training but experience with thousands of procedures. If you’re the patient, whom do you want “going to bat” for you? Chances are it’s the player with the best batting average and experience in the major leagues. Surgical athletes like this are precious. Let’s put them to work, maintain their bodies, their mental health and their skills, and let’s keep them on the field for many years to come.

Disclosure: Hovanesian would like to acknowledge Stephen Dell for introducing him to the term “surgical athlete.” Hovanesian reports no relevant financial disclosures.