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Consider Robotic Prostate
Surgery
Prostate cancer is a disease that’s survivable without surgery
if caught and treated early enough, but despite medical
advances, there are still times when the only choice to beat
the cancer is to have it removed from the body. Prostate
surgery is a well-known procedure, but there is still the fear
of scars, the recovery time, and worries about the surgery in
general. But there are advances in technology now that can help
to alleviate these problems.
If you find yourself needing to go on the operating table for
your cancer, consider robotic prostate surgery to help with
healing. The procedure for operating on an individual in
robotic prostate surgery is a little like playing a video game.
Rather than go in with his own hands and a scalpel, the
surgeon’s hands are connected to sensors that are a lot like
gloves and allow him to use his hands naturally to operate
robotic arms that perform the actual surgery. Cameras and
magnifiers give the surgeon a close-up view from the
inside.
Advantages
The big advantage to robotic prostate surgery is that
instruments different from the typical ones used in surgery can
be used, often more slender, which results in smaller holes in
the body. What this translates into for the patient is less
scarring and faster healing. Robotic prostate surgery boasts of
recovery times that can be weeks shorter than with traditional
surgery, which means less immediate impact on someone’s life.
This is possible because the magnification and the design of
the robot arms allow for more subtle movements than a surgeon
could perform on his own.
Disadvantages
Most of the disadvantages in robotic prostate surgery affect
the surgeon and not the patient. The most significant problem
in this surgery is that the doctor doesn’t receive any tactile
feedback from the robotic arms. If there is any sort of
resistance, the surgeon can’t feel it, and that’s a tradeoff
that many surgeons would prefer to not have. For this same
reason, robotic prostate surgery can be exhausting for surgeons
not used to it. Since it is still a relatively new procedure,
many surgeons are only just gaining practice with it, and so
it’s not as easy as traditional surgery. This means that even
if you request robotic prostate surgery, you may have trouble
receiving it in your area. Still, the advantages of such
surgery are great enough that you should at least ask your
doctor about the possibility of it, and hold some hope for a
speedy recovery.
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