This is an extraordinary assertion. Having watched my two elderly parents getting excellent -almost loving - care from surgeons on the NHS, I find it quite an offensive one. In both cases they sat down and spent quite a lot of time going through the pros and cons of surgery at at their advanced age. Dad decided to go ahead with a particularly ticklish piece of back surgery which gave him another 7 years of mobility and independence, even though it wasn’t fully successful.
I’m sorry that you had such an appalling experience. It’s not universal.
The stats you ask for are freely available in the NHS. The surgeon carried out the procedure on dad, knowing full well that it could quite possibly worsen his mortality figures.
I have had good experiences only after putting in a lot of research (that too after some painful lessons). And thats an option if it's not an emergency.
I have had to deal with a couple emergencies over the last couple years, where decisions had to be taken quickly. And I have seen both good and bad outcomes. The bad outcomes almost always are some guy at the ER acting as if palliative care is some unimaginable option.
They frame it simplistically "We have to move patient to the OR or they will be dead in X hours/by tomorrow etc". Just because it's possible to operate doesn't mean a surgery has to happen. Especially on elderly people.
It creates all kinds of cascading problems if it's a bad call. Good outcomes are possible but it needs a certain personality type and experience.
Most surgeons are mindless robots. So immersed in their craft, full of themselves and disconnected from the rest of the population that they don't pause to think too much about what they are doing.
Not unlike any other profession with hyper specialization. It takes other members of the team or group to reign them in.
The job involves a whole lot of decision making surrounding ambiguity and uncertainty, and there are certain personality types who are totally unfit to handle such decisions. They get pushed into the room because of other skills and mindlessly do what they are programmed too.
Few months back I saw one jackass more interested in showing a family video clips taken of the surgery on their 80 year old mother, than actually talking about what they had achieved through the 8 hour reconstruction of all her internals. She passed away a few weeks back after all that pointlessness.
After many bad experiences with family and friends, I always ask the specialist how many such ops the team has done in a year. And then, how many have long term positive outcomes. And then, if they can put me in touch with someone who has been through it a few years prior. These days its easy to dig up this information.