10 Great Sins that a Surgeon should avoid:
- Arrogance: The situation in which person sees himself/herself, as someone that knows everything on the surface of the planet, underestimating the views of other people and being indifferent to them, no matter who they are. It is observed more frequently in persons with an academic career. A surgeon can be both modest and dignified at the same time.
- Lust: The desire to earn endless amount of money, goods, authority and fame, through the practice of the profession: hoarding. The surgeon must face the feeling of worthlessness and deficiency which constantly feeds his greed.
- Hastiness: Careless, unplanned and sloppy approach, running after score and record. The surgeon, while exercising his profession, should learn how to be patient and attentive, even if it hurts. In a sense, surgery is the art of continuous review and deceleration.
- Academic Blindness: The reversal of the evolution due to inability of a qualified person or a team to renew the techniques are learned according to the requirements of the modern era. The state of surgical fanaticism, inattentiveness (state of looking at something but not being able to see it) the substitution of the deliberate questioning with learned reflexes. The surgeon should not be pro status-quo. He should not be afraid of innovations. The shortest way to show this is to give pay attention to young colleagues to give them the opportunity to express them and to apply their ideas.
- Lack of Professional Principles & Ethical Sensitivity: Seeing patients as a source of money rather than human beings; having a “shopping mind” in communication, establish relationship with colleagues based on self-interest. Changing ideas and color shape depending on the situation and the patient. Spinelessness, lack of ethical axial pattern. The principles can be applied only by having professional and ethical codes. Such organizations take their power and activities from the solidarity and dialogue they provide. Professional Guild system that emerged in Anatolia and then became a model for the whole world is a god example in that sense.
- Greed: To ignore the needs of other people, patients and colleagues, ignoring the basic professional and ethical rules in order to gain some more. Always wanting more without knowing the value of what they have. Austerity, being content with what one has, is a universal value that raises the rank of a surgeon.
- Not updating the professional knowledge: Staying away from professional and scientific renewal, disregarding advances that have taken place in benefit of the patients, la belle indifference. The surgeon may opt for not staying behind the scientific developments by following the agenda of development in surgery. In the age of fast, easy and cheap information that we live, there is no excuse for not responding to these requirements. No excuse can be accepted.
- Anger and Stress Control Disorder: To become a passive element and a person that could give damage to others by losing control in the face of an unexpected situation. It is the situation in which one leaves the game by losing professional and cold-blooded approach to the events and people. In his/her carrier, a surgeon should not start anything, a work, an initiative that he or she would fall by the way side. In any case he or she should remain in charge and assume responsibility.
- Jealousy: Obsessive comparison disease, a situation in which one could not stand the success of his/her colleagues due to greed and arrogance that is caused by professional competition. The surgeon has to re-obtain his/her self-esteem (in fact he/she is not aware its loss) in order to overcome this characteristics which is degrading and decaying its owner.
- Putting an Act on: (where the surgeon sees himself/herself as an artist or semi-god): Considering the workplace as a business or workshop would reduce the patient to a customer, and the surgeon to the tradesman, but this would not transform the work to an art or the surgeon to an artist. There are alternative ways of the profession that are open to, but not preferred by everybody. There could be a divine honor in the power of providing people some physical-social well-being. But this situation should not cause the surgeon consider him/herself as a semi-god. The fact that the work is a medical and scientific practice is the biggest and real obstacle to its consideration as an artistic process. The patients may not be able to realize this and with their good intentions, they may tend to see you as an artist, a semi-god. This is a compliment that should be taken into account but the surgeon should not ever have a dream of it. The surgeon should not lose his/her attention and awareness in any condition and time, nor should he or she look for his status in the words of other persons.
