Ear, nose and throat specialist Christopher Chang, MD, blogged about a Newark Star-Ledger story he saw about “surgeons on the cutting edge in fight against sleep apnea” using robotic surgery.
Chang wrote:
“My feeling is that using a robot to perform sleep apnea surgery is way overkill akin to using a $50,000 sniper rifle to kill an ant on the wall.
Everything the daVinci robot can do can also be done without the robot with equivalent patient outcomes. In fact, without the robot, the surgery can be performed more quickly, efficiently, and with less anesthesia than with the robot.
There are occasions where the robot may be helpful with ENT (ear, nose, throat) surgical procedures, but this is not one of them.”
You can search on our blog and find many other examples of robotic surgery hype.
Opinions on other issues in news, journals, PR, advertising, marketing
The tale of two “negative” studies. Or, how spin is applied to make research findings look more impressive. A must read. https://johnmandrola.substack.com/p/the-tale-of-two-negative-studies
The @nytimes chose to interview one of the editors of the @AnnalsofIM (publisher of this paper) who "gushed with extraordinary glee: It’s huge! There are very few things that reduce your mortality by 30%."
Turns out coffee is not one of those few things despite all that glee. https://twitter.com/garyschwitzer/status/1533202075928215558
Comments (4)
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Pdm68
January 6, 2012 at 2:57 pmSo,tell us how ? All he says is it’s using a high power rifle to kill an ant but never told us anything scientific to back it up
Gary Schwitzer
January 6, 2012 at 3:16 pmI guess you missed what he wrote: “Everything the daVinci robot can do can also be done without the robot with equivalent patient outcomes. In fact, without the robot, the surgery can be performed more quickly, efficiently, and with less anesthesia than with the robot.”
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