THE LAST GENERAL SURGEON?: Everything you wanted to know about surgical life but were afraid to ask by Sun Loony Amy

Author:Sun Loony, Amy [Sun Loony, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

15. Publish or Perish?

Getting published used to be an essential part of a surgical career, it used to be publish or perish, now it is no more than the icing on the cake. Surgical appointments will always be competitive and to have some publications on your CV will always be beneficial. First of all, find something to write, this is usually something you have some interest in; write about what you know. You must have somewhere in mind to publish it otherwise it will never get seen. There are thousands of online journals which would be suitable although some of them are businesses which charge the author, who surely is the person doing all the hard work. My advice is, if you cannot think of a novel idea, find a paper of interest and adapt it to ask a similar but different question. For example, I remember a paper showing that many chest X-rays were never looked at by the anaesthetist before an operation. I simply changed this to studying whether tracings of the heart rhythm (ECG) are reviewed by the anaesthetist prior to an operation. This was carried out in one afternoon by folding over the corner of the ECG with a paperclip and studying whether this had been dislodged. Of course the findings were similar to the chest X-ray study. It was interesting to send this paper to an anaesthetic journal where it was swiftly derided and rejected. However, the following week a surgical journal accepted the paper with glee.

In the days when surgery was a more popular choice for junior doctors and when the number of consultants was a fraction of the current numbers, you needed a CV full of research papers to impress any interview panel. I managed to get a cancer research job in London, working in a laboratory full of experienced, well trained, professional scientists. And me. If you ever end up in a laboratory doing the experiments make sure you know that a one percent solution by mass is not just adding 99% and that’s fine. It’s one gram of the substance in 100ml of solution. I would like to say I did not just look that up once again but that would be a fib.

Anyhow stopping tumour growth and its association with blood clotting was my remit. As a cocky surgeon mid-way through my surgical training it was no surprise to my wife when I returned home after the first week with fantastic news. ‘What did you do today?’ ‘Well I cured cancer before lunch!’ Not a joking matter but it happened 41 , just for one day, at least in my own mind. My fellow workers were suitably impressed I am sure when I mentioned it in passing.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone did cure cancer. The world would improve for many people and there would be many more people in the world; I suppose proportionately cardiac deaths would become more common though. I wondered whether

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