Latest Treatment on Prostate Cancer – Robot-assisted Cancer Surgery

The conventional prostate cancer surgery – the laparoscopic way usually involved taking out malignant prostate by doing tiny slits in the abdominal area and insertion of tools using hands for excising the organ.

However, presently, scores of patients are walking into doctor’s offices demanding surgery conducted by a robot, directed by a doctor not essentially present in the operation theater, with face sunk in a console, manoeuvring the robotic arms with assistance of remote control. Common query posted by patients is would the doctor be using the robot, and on getting an affirmative answer are ready to go for the surgery.Trends on latest treatment on prostate cancer clearly show that Robot-assisted Cancer Surgery is gaining momentum really fast.

At one stage, robot-aided surgery does appear sagacious with a robot’s lean arms better capable to reaching areas that would not be possible by human hands.

However robot-assisted surgery does come at a steep price of nearly fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars per patient. And it is still unclear if its results are better, inferior or similar.

One large-scaled nationwide study that contrasted results in Medicare patients pointed towards robot-assisted surgery leading to lesser complications however it could additionally cause more number of cases of people becoming impotent and incontinent following surgery.

It is still unknown if robot-aided prostate surgery would offer superior, worse or similar long-standing cancer control as compared to the conventional approaches, either with a 4-inch slit or with smaller-sized slits and a laparoscope. And investigators are unaware of any large-scaled studies intended or in the pipeline.

In the meantime, latest treatment on prostate cancer which is robot-assisted surgery has been widely marketed by hospitals and surgeons as a cancer curative likewise as fine as conventional prostate surgery and considerably enhancing urinary control.

When a hospital makes an investment on a robotic machine amounting to 1.39 million dollars and close to one lakh, forty thousand dollars annually for the servicing indenture, then physicians and patients turn ardent promoters, believing that new-fangled translates to better. Physicians and medical centers promote it and patients ask for it.

1 in 6 men in U.S. develop prostate cancer during their life span with treatment choices comprising of radiation and watchful surveillance, however surgery being the popularly opted one.

The robot’s capability of reaching into tricky inaccessible spaces comes along with its swapping. Generally, physicians could sense how cogently they are grasping tissue, how ably they could cut, and how well sutures hold. But with a robot, all this is missing. The robot could be quite slow-paced; it classically taking over 3 hours for a prostate surgery, double the time taken in conventional surgery.

It is unidentified if the additional costing of robot-aided surgery is being balanced by lesser costing for briefer hospital stays and lesser operative complications.

A study printed last year in The Journal of the American Medical Association, revealed that those patients having undergone laparoscopic surgery has briefer hospitalization, lesser transfusion rates and lesser breathing and operative complications. However, they additionally had more cases of people becoming incontinent and impotent.

Ultimately, patients must not presume that newer would automatically translate to superior and key assessments like number of surgeries a doctor has performed continue to hold significance. The gist of it all is that marketing does seem to rule the roost in this scenario.

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