Another bad example of reporting on robotic surgery

The surgeon who blogs and tweets as The Skeptical Scalpel (@Skepticscalpel) started my day with a Tweet that read:

Houston Chronicle’s hard-hitting exposé on robotic surgery. http://is.gd/lT5ed4

You have to know his work and his style to know that he was being sarcastic about “hard hitting exposé.”

The headline of the piece is:

Advances in surgeries with robots reduce risks and trim recovery times

The lead paragraph is:

What if you could have a major surgery with only a short hospital stay, very little pain, low risk of infection, little blood loss, minimal scarring, and a fast recovery and return to normal daily activities?

Unfortunately, readers are never given any evidence about reduced risk, trimmed recovery times, shorter hospital stay, very little pain or any of the other claims in the headline and lead.

The entire piece – as so many stories about robotic surgery tend to do – focuses on what it means to the surgeon:

• “improving the surgeon’s visibility and dexterity”
• “surgeons don’t have to remove their eyes from the scene of surgery”
• ” and they have more range of motion through the wrists of the device than through scopes.”
• “Straight-stick surgery is hard on the (surgeon’s) body – my elbows are up in the air, my shoulders are hunched; it’s very fatiguing”

While we all want surgeons who are comfortable with what they do (if we choose surgery), these testimonials do not necessarily equate to improved patient outcomes.

And while the story discusses using the robot in some new applications, patients/readers should be told something about the learning curve.  How long does it take a surgeon, using a new device in a new way for a different condition on a different part of the body, to become proficient?  If the answer is 500 cases, would you want to be numbers 1 – 499?

That’s what was missing in the “hard hitting exposé.”

Journalists can do better in reporting on new technologies, and on the proliferation of new technologies into new fields. And if they don’t, they’ll have to live with comments, like some of these, left in response to the Houston Chronicle story:

• “The biggest drawback is the cost. Much more expensive than laproscopic surgery and no significant benefit noted (studies have shown this). I have said for years that the robotic surgery devices are looking for an indication and the manufacturers have been very aggressive marketing these to community hospitals as a marketing ploy.”
• “I’m surprised this story appears at all because it isn’t news. Maybe one of the institutions mentioned in the story wanted some publicity, so they took a reporter to lunch and fed the reporter more than food (if you grasp my meaning).”

See past blog posts about robotic surgery marketing vs. data/evidence.

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