The Acute Management of Surgical Disease

Emergency General Surgery has become a cornerstone of Acute Care Surgery over the past decade. Once the scope of community general surgeons, the growing complexity of patients with acute surgical diseases has increasingly driven their care to tertiary referral centers. The aging population confounds this problem further as these patients present with more complex comorbidities, life-threatening physiology, and progressively severe anatomic disease severity. To ensure better outcomes, the practice has evolved to focus on evidence-based practice management guidelines in order to standardize care and optimize outcomes.

The purpose of this text is to be a comprehensive volume for patients with acute surgical diseases. There will be three sections, each comprised of multiple chapters. The first section will be a comprehensive analysis of the background of Emergency General Surgery. The goal of this section will be to provide the reader background into the acute surgical practice and to introduce the reader to the important concepts discussed in the remainder of the textbook.

The second section will be the largest and will discuss specific acute surgical diseases. Individual chapters will outline the diagnostic approach, current treatment standards, operative approaches, and expected outcomes with an emphasis on practice management guideline implementation into practice. As acute surgical diseases and surgical critical care are integral to each other, the last section will be Critical Care for the Acute Care Surgeon. These topics will focus on the critical care concepts essential to surgeons who care for acute diseases.

This comprehensive text is targeted to any surgeon who takes emergency call for any of the listed diseases including community and referral general and vascular surgeons. In addition, this would be an excellent resource for all general surgery residents. Lastly, this would also serve as a resource to intensivists who care for acute surgical patients.