Reason why surgeries get prolonged

There are people who advertise that they can perform orthognathic surgery quickly or that they can perform protruding mouth surgery quickly.

Regardless of whatever surgery, if you have little experience, it takes more time as there is hesitance or you are not operating proficiently. Accordingly, it is true that surgery takes less time once you become familiar with the surgery from repetition.

I think people who advertise fast surgery likely want to emphasize this. It could indicate that they have become skilled from sufficient experience.

However, this reduction in surgery time occurs when you haven’t performed that many surgeries. Even if you continue to perform the same surgery for more than a few years, or even decades, the surgery duration does not continue to decrease.

In my case, when I performed orthognathic surgery, for example, it took less and less and time until I had performed it about 50 times cumulatively. As for how long that took, the operation time gradually diminished for about six months after I started performing orthognathic surgery full-fledged. At the time, I had reduced the time required for orthognathic surgery (from starting the incision to completing the final suture) down to an hour.

However, interestingly enough, after peaking at about 50 cumulative surgeries, surgery started to take longer little by little. In fact, as I became more and more familiar and proficient performing surgery, the surgery time should’ve gotten shorter but rather increased little by little.

There are several reasons why the time rather increased gradually. 

Firstly, there are more aspects to contemplate or touch. If you continue to consider how to operate to achieve better results, there are more things you need to pay attention to. There are more and more aspects that you check that you didn't know before requiring more surgery.

Secondly, when performing surgery, rather than doing it faster but opting to take longer to do it more safely prolongs the surgery time. In bone surgery, the most important factor in reducing the risk and side effects of surgery is to only touch the bones and minimize damage to the tissues surrounding the bones. If surgery is performed trying to protect the tissues around the bones as much as possible, it takes a little longer as it is safer.

Lastly, when wrapping up the surgery, the time taken increases if you add the process of refining everything as much as possible once again when the operation could just end as is.

Now that I’ve done thousands of double jaw surgeries, it takes me more than 50% longer than when I had performed about 50. I could certainly operate now in the shortest time as I had before. But to do that, I’d have to skip all the procedures that I paid attention to during the thousands of surgeries that I’ve performed. I have no intention of omitting the process of putting in careful thought, so I don't think I'll ever be able to perform double jaw surgery again in the shortest time as I had before.  

So when I see people boasting about performing surgery quickly, I wonder what they’re trying to say. I'm not sure whether they mean to say they are not novices at surgery, whether they don’t want to put in more effort even if they’ve performed a lot of surgery, or whether they’re just in a hurry to finish if surgery was done to a certain extent.

In fact, those who want to finish surgery as quickly as possible are those who perform surgery like me. I could be tired, I could have other surgeries, and I'm often tempted to finish quickly. But I try to do my best when performing surgery even in such moments.

So I'm proud that I don’t perform surgery that quickly (compared to those advertising that they’re fast). Because the surgery time is the result of all the effort I have put into surgery thus far.

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