'Natural orifice' organ removal expected to increaseEarlier this month, doctors became the first in the Midwest and the third in the country to successfully remove a woman's gallbladder through her vagina, Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago announced yesterday.
The procedure inserts an endoscope, a "flexible snake-like device," into a small incision that's made in the vaginal wall. A small camera is also inserted through the belly button, so doctors can maneuver inside the body to remove the infected organ. Then the doctors grab the organ -- in this case it was the gallbladder -- and remove it through the vagina.
"Millions of women in the United States suffer from gallbladder disease, and many of those women will eventually have to undergo a surgical procedure to remove the organ, which is often painful and can have a lengthy recovery time," says Eric Hungness, a minimally invasive gastrointestinal surgeon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital who led the team that performed the surgery. The procedure may "reduce pain and shorten recovery time" and "eliminate the risk of post-operative wound infections or hernias" he says.
Surgeons have also been successful in removing a diseased kidney through the vagina (full story) and organs through the mouth.
Other forms of "natural orifice translumenal endoscopic surgery" (aka NOTES) have been performed about 50 times since 2007, the year USA TODAY profiled a Portland woman who had her gallbladder removed through her mouth. The popularity of the surgical technique is likely to "dramatically" increase in coming years, says Nathaniel Soper, director of the minimally invasive surgical program at Northwestern Memorial.
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http://blogs.usatoday.com/betterlife/2009/02/natural-orifice.html
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