There is no such thing as ‘minor’ surgery.

For obvious reasons – we are nearly all always hopeful of the best happening to us – most of us don’t often hear the potential negative consequences of some choice we’re making: a big mortgage, a new stock purchase or surgery we are going to get.

Now when it comes to mortgages and stocks going bad, all we lose is money; when it comes to surgery not working out as well as we’d hoped, we can have problems for the rest of our lives.

A reminder of that comes from a study in the British Journal of Surgery in which researchers talked to over 400 people in the Netherlands who’d had various types of surgery (cosmetic procedures, neurological operations, etc) a year after the surgery had been completed.

And a surprisingly high number of people were not satisfied with the results:

• 17 % reported more pain that they had had before their operations
• 14 % said their functioning had deteriorated
• 16 % had “poorer mental health”
• 24 % complained of less vitality

What really caught my eye, though, is that 47% said they had ‘achieved near optimal recovery’, which I presume meant they were nearly completely better, but that means that 53% – over half – still had significant problems, and a large 15% claimed to have less than 50% recovery.

Surgery can be life-saving, it’s often the only option, and sometimes the best option, but it’s always good to remember that surgery also carries significant risks and doesn’t always lead to improvement, so if someone tells you that you are about to have only ‘minor’ surgery, especially if it’s an elective procedure, just remind yourself that the best definition of ‘minor’ surgery is surgery done on someone else.