Getting your body and mind ready for surgery

I read an interesting paper published this year entitled “Can we measure surgical resilience?” It is just a hypothesis at this stage, but the authors are looking at whether there are biomarkers in patients that can measure psychological resilience associated with improved surgery recovery and healing.

They define resilience as “the ability to accept circumstances that cannot be changed, and to adapt to significant changes in the environment.”  Based on this definition, they are investigating different biomarkers that can distinguish high resilience from low resilience, with the idea that these biomarkers could then be prognostic of surgical recovery.  Once identified, the goal then would be how to utilize these biomarkers to find ways to optimize the resilience of low resilient people before they go into surgery, thus leading to better recovery. [...READ MORE]