My grand-daughter broke her arm a few months ago and had it reset. She had to go under a general anesthetic for that. Unfortunately, the arm wasn’t healing and then she had to have surgery. On the other hand, my cousin’s son broke his arm in the same place, he had surgery and had no problems with healing. Shouldn’t my grand-daughter have had surgery right away?

Surgery has risks and is generally avoided as much as possible. If a treatment can be done without surgery, it really is. Some risks associated with surgery for a broken bone include damage to the tissue around the broken bone, blood loss, and infection. In your grand-daughter’s case, her doctor likely felt that she had a good chance of healing properly without surgery, so he or she took that approach. The fact that she had to have a re-adjustment to the break may not have had anything to do with the original treatment. In fact, studies seem to show that there isn’t a big difference between people who had to have a second procedure and whether they had surgery initially or not.