Depends on the surgery. You don't need a specialist to do your acute appendectomy or cholecystectomy, but you DO need a specialist to do your knee replacement or ICA aneurysm clipping.

Also, I assume the risk reductions presented are relative - e.g. if mortality from a non-specialist surgeon procedure is 5% and a specialist surgeon mortality has a 4% risk, the relative risk reduction is 20% (absolute risk reduction is only 1%), which sounds really high and may be statistically significant, but in the real-world does not matter all that much. This would be called statistically significant, but likely not clinically significant.

To be fair, by it's very nature, the Medical Industry should NOT get to the point where "Procedure A will cost you $______" or be subject to solid quotes. Most of the things you purchase that way, cars, houses, TVs, etc. are high-volume testaments to physics and industrial chemistry. When you're talking about something as fragile and complex as a human body, this isn't the way to go. If your alternator goes bad, you get towed into the shop and get a new one. If your appendectomy goes wrong, you could die or be affected for the rest of your life.

Equating medicine with consumer purchases is ridiculous and idiotic.

That being said, yes, your medical system needs serious work.

Favourites

1) Season - Autumn
2) Place in the world - Yellowstone National Park, without all the tourists
3) Children's book - Any of the Matthew Looney books
4) TV Series - Battlestar Galactica (the new series)
5) Word - butterfluggin
6) Film - Tough call, but I'm going with The Empire Strikes Back
7) Curse - "Twat" seems to be my favorite these days
Creature - Dolphins, even if they are the douchebags of the sea.
9) Past time - Organ donation
10) Person - My son, of course

Which one?

11) Dog or cat - Both, but I own neither. I have two rats.
12) Sweet or savoury - Sweet
13) Cereal or Toast - Toast
14) Tan or pale - Tan. I'm always afraid that I might have bored the pale ones to death
15) Shoes or barefoot - Barefoot. I have hobbit feet
16) Desktop or laptop - laptop
17) Drive or walk - Drive. This is America, dammit.
18) Drama or comedy - Comedy
19) Sex or food - Sex
20) Futurama or Simpsons - Futurama now, but I used to be a diehard Simpsons fan

The Sift

21) Your fave personal submission - Dutch musician with huge ears just wants to fuck you
22) A great comment on one of your vids - the awesome thing about this video is kronos was searching for porn and typed in his favorite fetishes "Dutch, musician, huge ears, wants to fuck me" and he just so happened to stumble across this.
23) Most off the wall member - evil_disco_man. He's quiet. It's always the quiet ones who put severed heads in the crisper.
24) Favourite user name - MycroftHomlz. It shows that smarty-pants scientists can't spell for shit.
25) Your most used channel - Comedy
26) Personal dumbass moment - Giving choggie my email address
27) Best avatar - schmawy's. All of them.
28) Partner in crime - I run with the Hole In The Wall gang, consisting of blankfist, rottenseed, dystopianfuturetoday, schmawy, his sister Issykitty, and alien_concept. Sometimes we let Farhad ride with us, because deep down he so desperately wants to be a cowboy.
29) Do people offline know of your sift problem - Not since I killed them
30) Idea for the site - Glory holes

About you

31) Where do you live - Casper, Wyoming, United States
32) Smoker/non-smoker - non-smoker (quit 12 years ago)
33) Left or right handed - righty tighty
34) Hair colour - reddish brown, with dashing gray highlights
35) Relationship status - I'm in a serious booty-call relationship
36) How tall - 5' 9", or 175 cm. 175 sounds bigger, so let's go with that
37) Children - One child on this planet is blessed with 50% of my genes
38) Ever had an operation - Many:
a. Appendectomy
b. Plate implants for a broken arm
c. Bone graft from pelvis for same broken arm that got horribly infected
d. Hemorrhoid removal - Yet blankfist is still here
e. Torn ligament repair - left foot
f. Torn ligament repair - right hand
g. Lasik eye surgery
h. Foot enlargement - Hoping that by corollary something wonderful would happen
39) Best feature - My beautiful spleen
40) Use four words to describe yourself - Morally bankrupt, donations please

If you could...what, who, when etc

41) Bring a famous person back from the dead - Jesus, just so he could tell all the neo-cons to shut the fuck up
42) Give 50 grand to any charity - Cancer/leukemia research
43) Send someone on a one way ticket to the moon - Me. I hear it's a good place to raise a family
44) Relive a moment in your life -
45) Have a superpower - Walking on water, that way I could tell all the neo-cons to shut the fuck up
46) Find out one thing you've always wanted to know - If there's an afterlife
47) Have the opposite gender deal with something you have to - Listen to all the talk about fucking fantasy football in the crapper at work
48) Be president for one hour - Give the Indians everything back, and send whitey back to Europe
49) Delete a period in history - What day was dystopianfuturetoday born?
50) Achieve one thing - Write the great American novel. About robot pirates from outer space.

I also got an appendectomy, back in 1990. Two inch scar in my lower abdomen with several weeks recovery time. If the laproscopic technique and healing both take less time, I'd say it's well worth promoting.

Long story short:
1983: Appendectomy took 15 minutes to do through open incision
2008: Laparoscopic appendectomy takes 45 minutes to 90 minutes, or longer to do.

As per KP, laparoscopic surgery good for patient.
Per snoozie, laparoscopic surgery not good for anesthesiologist at 2 AM.

Bottom line; patient always comes first. Buy your anesthesiologist a strong cup of coffee, and go for the laparoscopic technique. You'll be glad you did.

Gunrock to tech: "can I send you my DXDiag thru email?"
Tech to Gunrock: "Sorry, I don't have email."

LOL, It's so pathetic. So much a lie, but is the Tech really lying? Every second of his workday is already programmed by his supervisors. He doesn't have time to read email.

Yer on the way to the hospital.... and you ask the EMT to perform an appendectomy.... and he says, sorry, I don't have a knife.