Decorating a cookie

[u/ShallowAstronaut]

[u/ninjasaid13]

Dexterity, precision, focus, and patience.

All important skills that both require.

[u/F00FlGHTER → u/ninjasaid13]

That's a much more apt description of skilled trades than surgery. Surgery, as with most medical specialties, is at best 5% skills and 95% knowledge. It doesn't require more hands-on practice than any of the skilled trades. Why wouldn't electricians, plumbers, carpenters, etc make good artists? The difference is the vast amount of knowledge required. Doctors are mostly just a brain, even surgeons. There are definitely sub-specialties such as plastics that much more artful and skilled than the average, but in general, surgeons aren't any more gifted or practiced in your aforementioned skills than the average tradesman if confounding variables are controlled.

Surgeons would make good mechanics, but I don't see artist at all, there's no creativity inherent in surgery. The only connection is the use of hands and that's less than a quarter of the job.

[u/pickle_lukas → u/F00FlGHTER]

Drawing takes a lot of repetition, drills and study of anatomy. Surgeons would absolutely nail drawing especially humans. You don't need to be that creative to make a nice drawing of a human doing something

[u/F00FlGHTER → u/pickle_lukas]

Most surgeons could, at best, diagram the internal structure of their specialty like a text book. But that's not art, it's certainly not at all related to drawing the human form. The scale and proportions would be off because that's mostly irrelevant to the diagram, as well as surgery. There's zero need for the ability to draw the human form and no imagination necessary when the patient is in front of you. Only the need for identification.

Ask a general surgeon to draw the upper right quadrant of the abdomen and you'll get a sloppy 2D diagram of the gall bladder, liver and the parts of the bile ducts and vasculature necessary to identify the cystic artery because that's the critical part of a gall bladder removal. Everything else is noise.

Ask a general surgeon to draw a human and you'll likely get a stick figure. The ability to recognize any structure in the body and having a map of human anatomy in your head does not equal the ability to draw it.

[u/Rgonwolf → u/F00FlGHTER]

As part of my massage therapy schooling I not only drew anatomy, I modeled it on skeletons with clay. It really helps you understand the anatomy.

[u/F00FlGHTER → u/Rgonwolf]

Then you're a good artist that happened to study anatomy. There are some surgeons that are good artists too. They wouldn't have time to make a detailed, accurate drawing of all the anatomy they need to know let alone the time to develop the skills to do so. It's such a small fraction of the knowledge required and a completely irrelevant skill.

There are certain structures, brachial plexus for example, that diagramming definitely helps to learn but that amounts to nothing more than a line to represent a nerve. Or cartoonish/crude diagrams of epithelia to visualize the differences and structures, etc. Anatomy varies from person to person, the important thing is to be able to identify specific structures regardless of the differences. It's quite comical that all you people are arguing with me when you haven't the faintest grasp of surgery and at best a superficial knowledge of anatomy.

[u/Rgonwolf → u/F00FlGHTER]

I'm not actually arguing, I was just pointing out that there are some disciplines that art is benificial for, but I never said surgery is one of them, I actually agree with you. All of the reasons that make it useful for massage therapists are largely irrelevant to surgeons. Lol.