How do Doctors Learn How to Perform Surgery?

A surgeon is a type of medical doctor who specializes in treating illness and injury through operating on the patient. Surgery can be relatively minor, such as making stitches to bind together a small wound, or extremely major, such as opening a patient to replace an essential organ. The path doctors take to learn how to perform surgery is not an easy one. It requires many thousands of hours of intense study and practice before being declared ready to perform on a live, human being. The mean time to becoming a surgeon, after completion of a high-school education, is approximately twelve years. The normal path to becoming a surgeon begins with an undergraduate education focusing on the biological sciences. Undergraduates pursuing medical school take a number of biology and physiology classes, as well as organic chemistry and basic physics. Students who are aware they want to learn how to perform surgery, often take electives focusing in depth on anatomy. Volunteer work is usually ...  more