Is da Vinci Robotic Surgery a Revolution or a Rip-off?

Even before laparoscopic surgery took off around 1990, several companies, backed by U.S. defense grants, were at work on robotic surgical systems. Laparoscopic surgery has proven to be a significant medical advance, turning major surgeries that left scars and kept patients in the hospital for several days, into fairly minor procedures. As robotic surgical systems moved through research and testing, many doctors hoped the new technology would increase those advances. The companies building surgical robots were certainly optimistic. In product names like Zeus, Aesop, and da Vinci, one can hear great aspirations.

Dr. Quoc-Dien Trinh, a Harvard urologist who uses the da Vinci, was reluctant to conclude that people who don’t need surgery are getting surgery. But the data points in that direction.

“It’s hard to incriminate the individual, but if you look at general trends in the population, that’s what it shows. These new technologies have always disseminated mostly in low-risk populations,” he said.

Source: HEALTH NEWS