With Robotic Surgery Prostate Treatment Comes Under New Risks
Surgical robots are a great innovation of our time. They help bring additional precision to the operating table and to weed out human error. But there is an interesting aside to this view of things. Any hospital that invests the new units needed in buying surgical robots somehow always lands up performing more robotic surgery prostate cures than any hospital that relies on plain old-fashioned human surgery. This is what a new report in the journal Medical Care finds. Anybody with a prostate problem who goes to the hospital, needs to check if the hospital uses robots. If it does, chances are high that the patient will find that the doctors there somehow find their way to the conclusion that surgery is in order.
It is not just robotic surgery prostate sufferers need to concern about.
As the study shows, doctors treating prostate surgery look to be influenced by nigh anything other than consideration for what the science has to say about the benefits and risks of any kind of treatment. They’re influenced by the kind of technology that they need to push, by the marketing goals of medical companies, and other things. The general public already has little idea how to deal with something as confusing as prostate cancer. They already are faced with such an array of hard options even when they only consider what the science recommends. They can opt for surgery to remove the prostate gland in some way, they can ask for a radiation therapy, hormone therapy or they can ask to upright remain under observation because prostate cancer is a very slow-growing cancer that may actually end up doing nothing before a person’s natural life runs out. And now, men around the country need to not only navigate their way through all these options, but also to wonder if their doctor has an agenda.
So how did this study arrive at the conclusion that it did? They studied hundreds of small hospitals around the country that had just bought surgical robots, and they studied tens of thousands of male patients who had come to these hospitals for prostate cancer treatment. Every hospital handed out prescriptions for dozens of extra operations each year once they had a robot (compared to what they used to do a year earlier). And that’s dozens of operations in a case list that runs to no more than a hundred.
Maybe it’s somewhat an innocent mistake that doctors make; perhaps when they possess capabilities in robotic surgery prostate problems, just seem to them like a chance to use their new toy. But these same hospitals have been advertising their robotic capabilities rather strongly. The implication is clear: if you go to a hospital with such capabilities, you are asking for trouble.
