Dear Reader,

Welcome to this issue of European Surgery. Present times ask for short, brief and focused approaches. We have run out of time, space and attention. There is not much time left for the surgeon to read, listen and learn. There is a lot of work to be done. Routine calls for increased respect, tolerance and understanding. Productive and highly stimulating management has to react to meet the requirements of our present episode of humankind. The interaction between a natural phenomenon and the inventions and achievements of man tailor a new life for all of us—you and me and your friends, neighbours and families. Cultures call for positive vibrations. May we offer the fascinating harmonic sound of a new age.

Going in line with these suggestions, this issue of European Surgery orchestrates a topic related to an important and frequently treated condition: the surgical and interventional management of biliodigestive and gall bladder disease. The editor of the topic, Professor Hans-Jörg Mischinger, Graz, Styria, Austria, and the authors are to be congratulated for this beautiful, well-tuned temper of knowledge and the straightforward presentation of recent evidence. May the papers foster a better understanding and contribute to ease your surgical routine.

Our life is all about changes and processes and alterations of states of mood, tune, temper and atmosphere [1,2,3,4]. As such we have to learn to deal with the translation of actual issues and states of affairs which are new to us, which have not been seen before (at least by us!). Novelty counts our power, strength and endurance. As such, time may stress and foster the development of a fruitful future.

Dear reader, how is and was the morning of your day, today? Did you get a good or an excellent cup of coffee [4]? Espresso di Napoli (watch out for Vesuvius), di Tropea (watch out for Stromboli!), di Palermo (watch out for Phoenicians), di Catania, di Enna (watch out for Etna)? Blue Mountain coffee, Jamaica, watches out for the outstanding joker smoker community (JSC) including Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, Bob Marley, Burning Spear, Gregory Isaacs, Dennis Brown, U‑Roy, Yellow Man, Big Youth and co-smokers. The more we reach out to the north, the higher gets the probability that any taste gets weak, colder and lost. Why? Lack of light? Lack of healthy temperature? Lack of adequate climate? What is adequate? What is healthy? Lack of positivity? Why does something get lost? Due to the dawn of the hemispheres? Which hemispheres are we talking about? Feel free to consider those you like to see, happen and esteem. However, the globally curved geometry of spacetime teaches: the longer your path keeps on following a given direction, the probability increases that you may come back to the point where you have started. May truth be nothing else than a return? Or may it simply be the result of our model group thinking?

Foster your day

Every morning harbours the full spectrum of possibilities, decisions and qualities [1]. During the course of the day, individual colours and tempers and moods and atmospheres evolve and select. As such happens the course of individual decisions actual events. This is the matter of facts lined up within the newsroom of a given web-based global platform [3, 4]. Information counts. There you may read: breaking news! But you will never read: breaking despotism; breaking hate, greed, hunger, envy and war! You will read: breaking news! But you will never read: “Hey you out there, we are brothers and sisters, we are a big family, we are all coming out of Africa, we are all the members of a great possibility.” Let us stop hate, greed, envy and war! Let us sit down and invest our energies to be happy! Breaking news: utopia may become reality, at least for this actual moment, where you, dear readers, are reading these lines. Peace, love and happiness are possible, do not get yourself involved in the power games, do not get yourself involved in hate games, remote-driven ideas which are not your ideas; stop blindly following the ideas and hopes and desires and emotions of wicked bald-heads, mind-setters and plagiarism [2,3,4]. Stop mastering and enlarging and increasing and stimulating and fostering group thinking [2,3,4]! Be you! Please, definitely be you! Be critical! Resist group thinking! Resist! You cannot wish the death of a patient, the suspension of a colleague, the destruction of the planet, the elimination of the world without becoming a victim of your actions. Please consider the possibility to resist, at least for the moment of an actual breath.

Today you may consider the following: allow yourself to think; allow yourself to have an opinion, which is your own opinion, which ultimately belongs to you, which is not the worst-case scenario copy of another, bad, stolen and “take-away” idea. Allow your individual conduct of reasoning, which does not simply follow the uncritical mindset of others, who want to rule you, who want to school you, who want to deceive you, who want and wish to misuse you for their purposes and simply to achieve power over you. In fact, all what they are and all they pretend to do is vanity! Think about it! Are you infused and hit by vanity?

Do not become a simple uncritical soldier of your academy, a follower of a stolen idea [4]. Put into question what your leaders claim, even if your leaders pretend that what they say is the truth [2, 3]! Go on down to the data, take your time to read the papers carefully and ask yourself: is this the right and appropriate method to address the questions that the study aimed to solve? Psychology tries to reveal the cloth of truth. Wisdom harbours the chance to undress the world, at least for a short moment. Reality counts, truth believes. Errors fill the web. You are the gap. Within what? Allow yourself to sit down and ask yourself: am I doing or am I simply reacting to the feels, signs, commands, instructions and orders given by others, including the World Wide Web? Am I the victim of a special form of digital burning and looting, web-based despotism, including Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others? Am I ignorant, because it is easier to be ignorant, instead of going out to develop and stand behind my own idea? Conviction counts. Cowards gap out. Am I adequately educated? Do I know how to behave? Discipline counts. What type of discipline? Related to what? Related to military, academical, lifestyle, eating behaviour issues? What is a culture? May it be the habitual manifestation of collective ancestor reflux [3]? Am I fostering the downhill race of our culture because it is easier to reproduce the ideas of others, when compared to having my own opinion, which has to evolve within a critical conduct of reasoning? Am I contributing to the failures and disasters happening out there, in my institution and in the world? Am I contributing to the dawn of the gods? Or am I simply behind my own reputation? Did I collect reputation at all?

Why the hell should I continue to read those lines? What the hell does the author want me to do? Jamming? Does he want me to follow his ideas? Why should the ideas of the author be better than the ideas of my outstanding boss, the head of my highly honoured institution, the chief of the unit of vernal, expanded and high-volume surgery [2, 3]? Which reality is closer to the truth? Yours, mine, hers, his? Is there anyone who may be allowed to state: I know the truth? Why should his ideas be closer to the truth? Because of Stan and Ollie? Star Wars? Jurassic Park? Love and Monsters? Rocky? Lord of the Rings? Mickey Mouse? Goofy? Tom and Sherry? Shrek? Lovely? Disgusting? Maybe the author represents the clever and hidden way of another form of despotism, which wants to get power over me? Stop! Full stop! Morals teach: You are responsible! You are also responsible for what you do not do, but what you watch and allow, permit, enable and license to happen. Uncritical observation may foster group thinking and despotism. Stop! Full stop!! Even watching serves responsibility! Who invented morals? Who invented the truth? Who invented surgery? Who invented reality? Who invented philosophy? Who invented Hollywood? What are the aims and scopes of this editorial?

The reply of the author: I just want you to step out of your routine life for a moment and to reconsider your existence [1,2,3,4]. I just want you to ask yourself: am I happy with what I am doing and how I am doing my surgeries? Am I taking care of patients or am I simply running after the money to make my living and that of my family? Am I following and serving (!) uncritical group thinking? Am I running out of health, wellbeing and life quality? Am I loved? Am I respected? How would I define success? Am I allowed to know who I am? Who am I ? Am I the centre of my world? Am I a thought? Am I an idea? A case? What case? The universe is the vessel of my mood, temper and atmosphere. Let the sun rise, follow the moon, stars and galaxies. Zodiacs count the years. Here we go!

Patient history

Before you start to think and resist, please do that: sit down and drink a cup of beautiful coffee or take a meticulous cup of colonial tea and feel good! And if you go out to remember that in the future, you may call it history. As a consequence, we have to admit: every story evolves out of a morning and leads to the conduct of reasoning which is ordered and structured and written by the science that we call “history”. Thus, history recalls everything except the state of emotion, tune, mood, temper and atmosphere that underlined the evolvement of events and was present within a given moment to foster the development of given facts. These facts are consequently “remembered”, registered, structured, listed and ordered by the discipline termed “history”. In contrast to that, myth aims to fuse history and emotion, facts and belief [2]. Therefore, history fails to adequately record the emotional source of events. History leaves out the impact of atmospheric power. The same is true for any patient history [3]. Thus, we should try to learn about the emotional aspects that led to the development of a disease. As such, when you, dear Reader, are going to take the patient history—the history of your patient (are you allowed to own a person?)—do not forget to take the history of the atmosphere out of which the individual became aware to perceive a sickness and recognised to be the owner of a malady [3]. Emotion generates disease, disease generates atmosphere. Thus, taking of the patient history should also serve to take the “myth” of the individual. Most importantly, disease frequently remembers individual and collective ancestor reflux [3]. As such, disease fuses history and emotion. Therefore, surgery is unique, as it dissects the anatomy of individual and collective memory. What is the emotional stage of your ancestor reflux? Oncology teaches: R0 resections are the best! Remains to be questioned, what happens, if we ask: when started the dawn of the morning of the European culture and idea? Why? Why would this question be of interest for you? Why?

Answer: dear Reader, you read European Surgery! Got it? Did you get it? Did you get the point? Congratulations! Let us dawn for the morning of Europe! Why? Because it is all about you, irrespective of whether you think about it or not. Irrespective of whether you sit in the Americas, India, China, Australia, Antarctic, France, Spain, Ireland, Island, Greenland, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Syria, Egypt, Armenia, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Greece, Nubia, Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Kongo, Austria, and so forth (enrich excitement by looking at your globe!). Healthy teeth are white, irrespective to whom they belong (shark, dog, man). Infections may count. Here we go!

Old European civilisation

At first sight, so-called well-known old stories may seem totally clear to us [1, 4]. But suddenly reasoning gets aware of an interesting discovery. Liver, bile, lungs, brain, kidneys, pancreas, gastrointestinal glands developed around a tube, around a river, around a flow and serve the translation of fruits of the spoon into digestive fluids and secretions. Going in line with this observation, our world carries outstanding and exciting discoveries that have been made in the past 20 years. Watch out!

The Danube is a river that carries the fluids, secretions and stories of those who have made their living along, aside and adjacent to the shores and banks of the river. And suddenly we become aware that there has been an exciting flow of events that now help to reconsider European history. As such, European Surgery also aims to serve as the platform to attract our attention towards the roots of the European idea, and the history of the European civilisation may be seen under the perspective of new exciting discoveries that have been made along the banks of the Danube river. According to the scientist Professor Harald Haarmann [5, 6], the very early story prior to the invention of European Surgery would go like this:

Long before the ancient Greek culture, there was a peaceful, trade economy-based civilisation along the banks and shores of the Danube river, the so-called Danube Civilisation [5, 6]. Since the first discoveries of traces of this stone age culture were made in Vinca, a small village southeast of Belgrade, Serbia, the Danube Civilisation is also termed Vinca culture [5]. Haarmann suggested the term Old European civilisation or culture [5].

The Old European civilisation formed and developed around 8000 years B.C. and lasted until around 3000 B.C. As such, the Old European civilisation closes the gap between the culture of Göbekli Tepe (Anatolia, Turkey; 11,000 B.C.–9000 B.C) and the archaic Greek, Mesopotamian, Indus Valley and Old Egyptian cultures [1,2,3,4,5,6]. The Vinca culture extended from today’s Vienna to the Danube delta, along the Balkan and the western shores of the Black Sea and the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea southeast of the Balkan [5, 6]. Thus, the Old European culture covered the vast majority of present Central and Eastern Europe. Going in line with the work of Haarmann and others, our present Europe largely relies on the legacies of the Old European civilisation. During the course of history, the Old Danube civilisation fostered stone age cultures in the Bretagne (Carnac) and England (Stonehenge). Most excitingly, an increasing body of evidence indicates that the Old European civilisation invented a scripture and that this happened approximately 3000 years before the Sumerian and Egyptian writings were introduced [5, 6].

As such, European languages, arts and crafts kept the remembrance of their roots [2, 4, 5]. Even the language used in this journal works with technical terms and features rooting back to the language of the Old European civilisation [6]. As such, European Surgery is allowed to continue the legacy of the Old European culture and civilisation. Again, we see how beautiful life may be if we allow the large scope vision towards our beautiful and exciting world. The same may be true for you and for your surgeries. Be you and allow yourself and see the fruitful possibilities offered by the achievements of our modern world. Visit Vinca, using your tablet, PC or cell phone. Open your mind for new models and large-scale adventures of reasoning and increase the range of your horizon. Structure your being for positive vibrations; get up, stand up and lively up yourself. Here we remember the spirit of a man who died 40 years ago due to the consequences of a malignant skin disease: Bob Marley, born February 6th, 1945 in Nine Miles, Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica; died May 11th, 1981 in Miami, Florida, USA, world, earth, solar system, milky way, universe. Do not worry, everything gonna be alright.

Verse

Verse Taken together, bile the bladder, stream the temper Ovid the metaphors, for the unification of our minds.

Surgery unites the world. Life equals the fascinating orchestration of neurohumoral secretions [7]. We are all panic and pancreatic, irrespective of what we do, cut, smell, resect, taste, deceive, talk, think, argue, wish, say, clean, state, consider, assess, accept, reject, beat, wonder, watch, sing, laugh, shout, clamp, dance, hope, close, eat, drink, open and read.

Secretions count the life-long stream of emotions and atmospheres [4, 7]. Fuse that into knowledge and here we go: once upon a time there was a thought, and this thought was not a joke: such moments allow peace, love and happiness. Orchestrate yourself. Stay tuned,

Sincerely,

Martin Riegler.