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Beyond Safety: Is Robotic Surgery Sustainable?
Hallie Siegel writes: The release last week of the study on adverse events in robotic surgery led to much discussion on the safety and effectiveness of robotic surgical procedures. MIT Sloane's Matt Beane argues that while the hope is that this dialogue will mean safer and more effective robotic procedures in the future, the intense focus on safety and effectiveness has compromised training opportunities for new robotic surgeons, who require many hours of 'live' surgical practice time to develop their skills. Beane says that robotic surgery will likely continue to expand in proportion to other methods, given that it allows fewer surgeons to perform surgery with less trauma to the patient, but no matter how safe we make robotic surgical procedures, they will become a luxury available to a very few if we fail to address the sustainability of the practice.
This is an idiotic idea, as it presumes that nowadays robotic surgery is somehow a commodity available to the masses.
We can't just keep digging up fossil robotic surgeons, that will only last another hundred years. It's time we started developing renewable robots.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
The growth in the use of the word "Sustainable" is unsustainable.
Prod_uct, BSD's All our times have
... we have to follow Shakespeare's advice regarding lawyers.
The issue seems to be that while conventional surgery requires help from students robotic surgery does not. It becomes very difficult for a student to do part of the surgery and thereby learn by doing. A possible solution would be better simulations so that a student can learn by doing. I think it is a very different than working on a cadaver or simulated patient using conventional methods. The main one being that there is already a separation from the patient by the machine. Every image and feedback that the doctor gets through the robotic surgery device can be simulated by software. It can be programmed to simulate problems so the doctor has to deal with more realistic issues. In effect a flight simulator for surgery.
Only if situated in the state's only "self-sustaining scallop farm". Now say that five times fast...
Unprecedented and problematic!
How will we know the robotic surgeons have installed the most recent security updates? Will they be WiFi enabled so the teenager sitting in the hospital cafeteria can use them to play Operation and try to light up my nose while trying to take out my funny bone?
You are welcome on my lawn.
A possible solution would be better simulations so that a student can learn by doing. I think it is a very different than working on a cadaver or simulated patient using conventional methods.
You obviously aren't familiar with surgical departments or you wouldn't have missed practice surgeries on live animals.
For instance: a typical cardiac surgeon, shortly before EACH operation on a human patient, does a practice operation of the same procedure on a live dog.
One pediatric cardiac surgeon was much beloved by his patents and their families, because (with parental permission) he would let the kid adopt the practice dog, rather than sending it to be destroyed. The kid would wake up from surgery with the new puppy beside him, with the same bandages, etc. (and a day or so farther along in recovery). The dog having been through the same procedure and having helped save the kid's life even before they met made for very strong owner/pet bonds. (There's always a live, healthy, practice dog. If the dog dies (or is severely damaged) the assumption is that the procedure failed. You DON'T do a procedure on a human if it just killed a dog. You analyze, adjust the procedure, and repeat until success.)
Getting skills up does NOT require, or usually involve, a lot of practice on JUST advanced simulations, cadavers or, live patients. The live patients are just the last step, when the skills are already finely honed, and the animal models provide immediate feedback, real situations, and automatically correct modelling of mammalian life processes.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
the real question is when will we advance this technology far enough to not just be an assistive device for surgeons to actually being the surgeons?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Complete Adrenalectomy.
Done at 7AM on Monday went home noon on Tuesday afternoon. Nothing but Tylonel, pain free by Wed morning. Dr. said less than a cup of blood was lost.
Now I have 5 cool looking, little holes that I tell people were gunshot wounds.
He used a Da Vinci robot.
Alternative was open surgery, complete with a 6 inch incision and a week in the hospital.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
How do surgeons get away with calling a Waldo a robot? There is no such thing yet as a 'surgical robot.'
No, a robot surgery simulator could be made. Also, surgeons could get experience with simpler surgeries, such as plastic surgery.
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Now you'll have to worry about the surgeon's wifi access point :(
with cleartext passwords that are never changed from the default.
The malware will be called Hack and Slash (for obvious reasons).
Nothing to do with sustainability, nothing to do with robotic surgeons: worst summary ever. Not that I blame the submitter for this, it's the article which says "robot" when it really means remote controlled instrument, and "sustainability" when it's really talking about inadequate training. This is ridiculous though. I had this brief vision of robotic surgeons operating via some machine learning algorithm and... sustainability something... I hadn't worked out how sustainability factored into it before my illusion was dashed. Maybe they were running out of humans or something.
Well, maybe it's not yet ready for regular use, but in the end when the robots have been refined, it will be the ONLY way one still wants a surgery.. It's not like regular surgeon doesn't make mistakes, it sadly happens too often, but that no wonder, they are only human too..
If the GOP get back in then most healthcare will be come a luxury.
And good luck paying for that when there are X3 more H1B's and maybe even no min wage.
I, for one, welcome our new knife-wielding robot overlords.
I'm an anesthesiologist. I put people to sleep for cardiac surgery. My hospital does around 400-500 hearts a year... and we don't kill any dogs.
What hospital is that? I'll want to avoid it if I ever need heart surgery.
Seriously: How does your cardiac unit's mortality and morbidity rate stack up against those of hospitals where practice surgery on live animal, models, at least where the surgeon is new to the procedure, is more common?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well, instead of voting for establishment GOP politicians, people could try voting for right-wing populists instead. Problem is, the populists aren't big fans of amnesty. And certain people view that the same as being racist. (Of course, these populists might also end the H1B visa program...)
I was halfway through tfa before I realized that a "robotic surgeon" is actually a human, because in spite of being called robots these devices cannot do anything on their own. What does this mean for our "robotic overlords"?