Surgical Procedures Overview

The following sections represent typical, uncomplicated postoperative courses for surgeries typically encountered as a medicine consultant. The information is selected from a medical, rather than a surgical, point of view. Clearly, every postoperative course is different. It may have been years since an internist has seen a post-op surgical patient—therefore our goal is to give the internist a general sense of a patient’s postoperative course, and to highlight surgical issues that may impact other medical diagnoses and treatments. As always, it is no substitute for communicating with the surgery team.