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So how does a doctor do robotic surgery.
Typically, a patient is brought into the operating room and positioned, then you are put to sleep.
Once you are asleep, essentially the surgeon and his assistant will make some small incisions
on your abdomen and fill your belly up with carbon dioxide gas. What the carbon dioxide
gas does, it creates a working space to allow the surgery to be done. Once the working space
has been created with the carbon dioxide gas, small little cylindrical tubes are placed
into the abdomen that allow the placement of instruments into the abdominal cavity.
Once those instruments have been placed in, a robot is then docked with these cylindrical
tubes and one as a surgeon can go over to the console and maneuver these instruments
using your hands and feet. Now what is interesting about the robot is the robot is a master slave
type of arrangement, in other words the master sits at the control panel and he can move
his hands in different directions which will control the movements of the instruments within
the abdominal cavity. The feet are actually used in robotic surgery for a number of things.
If one wants to burn a particular blood vessel with an instrument, what you can do is step
on a foot pedal that will activate the cautery or bipolar cautery. You can actually move
the lens that is placed into the abdominal cavity with your feet. Your hands actually
move it but when you step on a particular pedal, what that does is it can move the lens
in and out and control the lens. So robotic surgeon now has to be facile with his hands
but he uses his feet during the surgical procedure. Now a robotic procedure can take, you know
a variable amount of time depending on the experience of a surgeon. There are some surgeons
in which typically takes two even three hours to do this surgery, some surgeons can do it
in an hour. The surgical time, I don't think, is a good indicator. I think what is important
of a patient that is trying to choose a robotic surgeon is to look at the experience. Clearly,
the literature suggests the more robotic cases a surgeon has done, probably the better outcomes
he will have.
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