Natural orifice surgery has been
around for a couple of years now. The idea of natural orifice surgery is to
remove organs through natural orifices (mouth, rectum, vagina, and urethra.
This has an advantage over existing laparoscopic surgeries considering there is
minimal cutting which reduces the risk of infection and complications. However,
only 1,000 of these surgeries have been performed and although they are safe
they haven’t been around long enough to show if they are more beneficial than
existing methods. Sometimes I wonder if minimally invasive means it is a
minimally effective. My guess is that natural orifice is safe as either an open
or laparoscopic procedure and in time it will only get better and safer.
The
first procedure was performed by Kurt Roberts a surgeon at Yale University who
took out an appendix in 2008. The surgery took less than an hour and half. I
would point out that as surgeons do more of these surgeries they not only get
better at them but also faster. Dr.
Vikram Reddy a surgeon also at Yale University has performed a natural
orifice surgery on a patient with ulcerative colitis. The patient had his
entire colon and rectum removed with the largest incision being less than one
inch. I emailed Dr. Reddy and asked him about the applications of this type of
surgery on people with Crohn’s disease. According to Reddy he believes there
might be a role depending on where the Crohn’s is located and how severe it is.
If natural orifice surgery was able
to be shown to be both safe and effective for people with Crohn’s then it would
be an improvement over the traditional approaches of an open surgery or laparoscopic
procedure. However, much more research needs to be done on natural orifice surgery.
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