The Questions That Bring Us Together: Boston’s General Sessions
What makes a Congress worth attending? Sometimes, it is a technique we bring home. Sometimes, it is a conversation that changes how we think.
For Boston 2026, I wanted our General Sessions to offer both inspiration and challenge: shared experiences that connect surgical excellence with disease biology, patient priorities, compassion, and the possibilities of a more connected world. Together, these five sessions ask a question that reaches every surgeon: What does better care truly look like?
Honoring Our Legacy, Examining Our Present
General Session I opens Saturday by honoring the people who built our specialty and posing the questions that will define its future. We will honor Charles Koh, our 2026 Honorary Chair, celebrate our FAAGL Noteworthy Award recipients, and hear Michael Hibner’s Presidential Address before the induction of the 2027 AAGL President.
That same evening turns toward what practice actually looks like today. Fernando Heredia’s “The New Patients…and the New Doctors” confronts a shift many of us are already living: patients arriving with a diagnosis they found on a smartphone, and a marketplace where marketing, paid “certifications,” and social media visibility can pass for expertise. Heredia doesn’t shy from the consequence — surgeons increasingly inheriting complex cases from pseudo-experts, with the technical challenges and outcomes that follow. His MedTalk is a case for staying grounded in evidence and genuine expertise while still meeting informed patients where they are.
Looking Beyond the Lesions
Sunday morning turns that same instinct toward endometriosis itself. Kelly Wright’s deliberately provocative “Why Excision Surgery Hurts Women” argues that our decades-long focus on one operation has taught patients to advocate for themselves, but may have slowed our understanding of the disease underneath it. Her comparison is blunt: we would never accept a colorectal surgeon resecting bowel at every Crohn’s flare, yet excision has become a similar reflex for endometriosis.
Three scientists and two surgeons then take the discussion deeper. In the Main Stage debate “What Drives Endometriosis?”, Steven Young, Hugh Taylor, and Linda Griffith will each argue for a different biologic driver — metabolism and decidualization, endocrine signaling and progesterone resistance, and immune and inflammatory mechanisms — before Ted Lee and Cara King open it to moderated crossfire and audience polling.
Expect more than agreement. Expect questions about recurrence, persistent symptoms, and treatment response that challenge a purely lesion-centered view and help us reconsider what surgery can accomplish within comprehensive care.
The Science Behind Caring
If biology challenges how we treat disease, compassion challenges how we deliver that treatment. General Session III makes this connection explicit.
Gabrielle Whitmore’s “You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know” reframes awareness itself as a clinical intervention — showing how community education and stronger referral partnerships with PCPs, APPs, and midwives can shorten the path to diagnosis and restore patients’ autonomy along the way. From there, our keynote: Stephen Trzeciak, MD, MPH, will take us through “Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring Makes a Difference.”
A practicing intensivist, physician-scientist, and Chair of Medicine at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, Dr. Trzeciak brings scientific scrutiny to one of medicine’s most human questions: Does caring make a measurable difference? His keynote lays out the evidence and what it means for patients and clinicians alike.
Join us Sunday for a message that belongs at the heart of a surgical Congress.
Bringing Patients Into the Conversation
Monday morning brings something the AAGL Global Congress has never done before: General Session IV, “Endometriosis Across the Lifespan: Awareness, Access, Autonomy & Outcomes.”
Structured as a journey — understanding the disease, deciding on treatment, and living with what comes after — the three-hour session moves through patient story videos, real-world outcomes data from the LIDEA Registry, care across the lifespan from adolescence to menopause, the evidence (and lack of it) behind nutrition and lifestyle interventions, and the harder conversation about pain that persists after surgery.
With Suzie As-Sanie and Megan Wasson moderating key discussions, patients help set the terms of the conversation rather than simply responding to it. This is a chance to listen together, see where expectations and outcomes diverge, and strengthen the partnership real care depends on.
Measuring Success, Sharing Expertise
General Session V asks what surgical excellence actually earns a patient, then extends that question across the globe. Randa Jalloul’s “We Measure What We Can—Not What Matters” challenges us to look past operative time, blood loss, and complication rates toward the outcomes patients actually define as success.
“Border-Less Surgery” then makes that same excellence portable. Jamal Mourad, Javier Magrina, Mauricio Abrão, and Kathiane Augusto will walk through what they call the “digital cockpit” — pairing robotic computing hubs with cloud streaming and smart-glasses-based augmented reality so an expert can, in effect, scrub in remotely and guide a case in real time. The session closes by looking at the mentee’s side of that exchange: what virtual access to world-class mentorship does for a local surgical team’s skill, confidence, and patient outcomes.
Understanding disease, listening to patients, practicing compassion, and measuring the outcomes that matter — this is what it takes to become better surgeons, and to share that progress with each other.
Join us in Boston, November 13–16. Bring your experience, your curiosity, and your willingness to see familiar challenges differently with us.
