The aim of the symposium is to familiarize the audience with the current status and future directions of treatments for common and uncommon diseases of the foregut.

Diseases of the foregut include extremely common conditions like gastroesophageal reflux disease and rare motility disorders such as achalasia.  The diagnostic and treatment approaches to these conditions continue to evolve at a rapid pace.

The course will include a debate and case style format designed to highlight several of the more controversial areas in foregut surgery.  Specific patient scenarios will be presented to the audience prior to the presentations in each track.  Upon completion of each speaker’s talk and an opportunity for open debate and discussion, the audience will be polled once again as to how they might manage the same patient presented prior to the panel.  We hope to see that the audience will at least understand or consider alternatives to treatment they might not have considered prior to attending this course. 

In addition, complex abdominal wall hernias are difficult to treat. Many times patients have had multiple previous attempts at reconstruction and often present with chronic infections. The standard ventral hernia repair is often not enough to fix these patients.  Many national surgical organizations like SAGES are focusing their course content on complex hernia repair.