You all know that I am a plastic surgeon. But you may not know that the focus of my practice is reconstructive microsurgery.
Obviously I am biased, but I think reconstructive microsurgery is really cool!
And I love any opportunity that I get to talk about it. Which happened recently as I was invited as a guess for Virtual Shadowing hosted by the Premed Scene.
Basically, I got to talk to a bunch of premed students for 45 minutes about reconstructive microsurgery AKA what makes plastic surgery so cool.
And for this Sorta Random Sunday post, I’d love to share that presentation with all of you!
Disclaimer: This presentation does have surgical photos and videos.
In short, microsurgery is not a set operation. It’s a box of tools that we use in different situations to fix unique problems.
In these operations, we move tissue with a blood vessel from one part of the body to another. It’s called microsurgery because we sew these tiny blood vessels under an operating microscope.
Throughout the presentation, I cover more in depth:
- What microsurgery is
- Who does it
- Why we do it
And I go over applications of microsurgery for:
- Breast reconstruction
- Head & Neck reconstructions
- Upper & Lower Extremity reconstruction
- Genital reconstruction
- And more!
What do you think? Have you ever heard of or seen microsurgery? Interested in learning more? Let me know in the comments below!
Awesome. Thanks for sharing. What percentage of microsurgery is done using surgical robotics?
Hey Frankie, thanks for reading! It’s a pretty low percentage currently. A lot of these surgeries involve big open resections or injuries. But the involvement of robotics is increasing. I trained on the robot to do robotic DIEP flaps for instance. It’s an exciting area!