Lloyd Austin's prostate procedure: When is surgery considered 'elective'?

Is surgery for prostate cancer considered an elective procedure?The Defense Department has described Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s surgeryto treat his prostate cancer on Dec. 22 as an “elective medical procedure.” Austin, who went home the day after the procedure, later developed complications from the operation and was hospitalized Jan. 1, Walter Reed National Military Center officials said in a statement Tuesday.

Austin underwent a procedure called a prostatectomy, Walter Reed officials said, in which surgeons remove some or all of the prostate gland.

Aside from skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the U.S., according to the American Cancer Society. The cancer is more likely to develop in older men, and the risk is higher in Black men, the ACS says.

While “elective” can make it sound like the operation wasn’t necessary, the word instead refers to the timing of the surgery.

Simply put, any surgery that’s not needed very quickly to treat a medical emergency is considered an elective procedure.

Operations to treat appendicitis or ruptured gallbladders, for example, are emergency procedures, said Dr. Edward Schaeffer, the director of the Polsky Urologic Cancer Institute and chair of urology at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago.

An elective procedure doesn’t mean the surgery is optional, but rather that it can be scheduled in advance, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.

With elective surgery, “it doesn’t matter if we do it today or six weeks from now,” said Dr. Michael Stifelman, the chair of urology at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey. “The outcome will be the same.”

That’s especially the case for surgery for prostate cancer, which Stifelman said is “truly an elective