Benefits and Psychological Problems of Aortocoronary Bypass and Valve Replacement Surgery

The psychosocial outcome of heart surgery has not kept pace with its medical success. Thus while mortality has decreased from 30% to 2% over the last 30 years, the figures for psychic and vocational rehabilitation in the FRG remain as poor as years ago. Therefore describing the outcome of heart surgery means describing benefits and problems which reflect the discrepancy between the medical objective (from the surgeon’s point of view) and the poor subjective outcome (from the patient’s point of view) of heart surgery. But these are not only different ways of looking at the surgical outcome; they also represent a discrepancy between rationality and emotions that the patients discover in themselves: they see both aspects and suffer accordingly but are powerless to overcome the problem.