Fundamental Topics in Plastic Surgery PDF

Plastic surgery is one of the surgical disciplines with most presence in the media and, paradoxically, one of the most misunderstood too. Although the majority of lay public (and of course medical staff) have a very good idea of what an orthopaedic or cardiothoracic surgeon does, their knowledge about the daily practice of a plastic surgeon is generally limited to the aesthetic branch of our specialty, which, despite its great value, does not represent the whole scope of plastic surgery. In addition, the prototype of the plastic surgeon presented in advertising, television series, and movies in most cases makes the gap between illusion and reality even bigger. Furthermore, it is both surprising and demoralizing to realize every now and then how our own colleagues from other medical or surgical fields still do not understand the breadth of plastic surgery outside its cosmetic realms, a phenomenon that is highly contradictory as the roots of plastic surgery actually derive from its reconstructive legacy. So what is plastic surgery? The name comes from the Greek word plastikos, meaning “to mold or to shape,” which, although etymologically correct, and seemingly a good and intelligent answer to give our friends or patients when they ask the question, tells us little about what we actually do as plastic surgeons. Without a system or anatomical region of its own, it is hard to box plastic surgery into one specific definition or scope of practice. For example, how is a complex craniofacial reconstruction related to the tangential excision and grafting of a burn or to a flexor tendon repair in the hand?

In the very broad sense, plastic surgery could be thought of as the surgical specialty in charge of repairing what is wounded, replacing what is missing, restoring what is altered, and reshaping what is deformed. At the start of our training, most of us had an idea of what we were getting ourselves into, though probably for most, it was rather vaguely so, with very little interconnection between these fascinating things we started seeing every day, a lot of them for the very first time. And so, in this whirlwind of new concepts and techniques, we started digging into specific flaps for specific needs or reading on specific procedures and classifications, in an effort to prepare ourselves in the best possible way for the next case, studying on a case-by-case basis rather than on a principles-based approach. Not surprisingly then, trainees may sometimes know all about the anatomy and the technical aspects of the deep inferior epigastric perforator (DIEP) flap, but have a hard time describing the different ways in which flaps can be classified. And so the obvious becomes clear: in order to build our knowledge we need to start from the basics. But then comes the issue of where to begin the study from. Where do I find a good chapter on flaps? Where is tissue expansion described in detail? And again we start diving through pages of numerous textbooks, one with a good chapter on a specific topic but falling short on another one that is equally important, all of which renders difficult the study of these essential issues. This is especially the case during the early years of training, in which time is limited and thus going through different textbooks becomes frustrating and ineffective. In this context, Fundamental Topics in Plastic Surgery would help the reader as it has been designed and written to provide trainees with a solid foundation and a detailed description of the basic principles of our specialty.