"If Only I Had Seen You Sooner...": The Conversation We Don't Have About Prevention and Surgery

A conversation about prevention, surgery, and what comes before.There’s a moment in medicine that stays with you, when you realize a patient has reached a point where surgery is needed, and you quietly wonder:Could this have been caught earlier?Surgery saves lives.This is true.But it’s often not the beginning of the story.It’s the moment we enter the story.What happens before that moment?Subtle symptoms, shifts in the body, changes that don’t quite make sense--often dismissed, normalized, or missed.In this podcast conversation, Dr. Lorna Brudie and I explore when surgery is truly necessary, what patterns we see before patients reach that point, where prevention fits into modern care, and how we might begin to see patients sooner.This isn’t about choosing prevention over surgery. It’s about expanding the window, so we can understand the body earlier, before it has to speak louder.What if we listened sooner?What if we looked deeper?What if we connected the dots--before the diagnosis?