This comprehensive review is designed to update your clinical knowledge base and help you pass your General Surgery exams.  Emphasis is on evidence-based medicine and board-relevant standards of care, incorporating current best practice concepts, surgical approaches, and clinical follow-up strategies.  As a result, it provides a good review for your ABS written exams and a thorough general surgery review for physicians in practice.  In addition, many previous learners have found the course provided them with improved diagnostic and planning strategies, a better understanding of the best surgical approaches for the principal areas covered by general surgeons, and helped them recognize areas of weakness for self-study.

Objectives

After this review, each participant will be able to:

• Summarize the basic science fundamentals underlying patient management as applied to general surgery.
• Describe preoperative, operative, and postoperative patient care in the principal component areas of general surgery: specifical diseases of the head and neck, breast, skin and soft tissues, alimentary tract, abdomen, vascular system, endocrine system, comprehensive trauma management, and emergency operations, and critical surgical care.
• Discuss the principles of perioperative patient care in the surgical specialties of cardiothoracic surgery, pediatric surgery, and transplant surgery.
• Summarize the clinical care of patients with common problems in urology, gynecology, orthopedics, and burns.
• Demonstrate an understanding of tumor staging and describe the appropriate surgical and nonsurgical management required.
• Discuss non-operative management options for general surgery patients who may not require surgical intervention (e.g., patients with pancreatitis, portal hypertension, immunosuppression, multiple traumas).
• Outline the appropriate use of newer diagnostic and therapeutic methods such as laser-based applications; stereotactic breast biopsy; physiologic testing and evaluation of the GI tract; noninvasive vascular system diagnostic evaluation and invasive vascular interventional techniques; ultrasonography of the head and neck, breast, and abdomen; and endorectal ultrasound.

Faculty & Topics