Teaching prevention in surgery--is it an oxymoron?

Although surgery is not often thought of as the optimal pathway to health, it nonetheless can play a key role in many facets of medical student education involving disease prevention. This article defines the scope of the surgeon's involvement in teaching disease prevention and health promotion to medical students, enumerates possible learning objectives that may be (and often already are) incorporated into their surgical education, and describes seven examples of programs that have used innovative methods to include prevention teaching in their surgery curricula. There should be specific educational standards regarding prevention within the curriculum of each clinical specialty, and educational programs should be evaluated with outcome measures. Prevention teaching should not be performed differently and apart from current interventional teaching, but needs to be incorporated within it. Medical education occurs increasingly in outpatient settings. Even in the surgical disciplines, outpatient surgery and office hours are being incorporated increasingly into the clerkship experience. The resulting exposures to large numbers of patients with mostly early stages of surgical disorders afford excellent opportunities for surgeons to emphasize to both patients and students many of the important aspects of prevention.