ROBOTIC SURGERY AS THE 79 MILLION BABY BOOMERS BEGIN

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Robotic Surgery

As the 79 million baby boomers begin entering retirement age so are their doctors. From 1985 to 2006, the percentage of doctors 55 and older rose from 27% to 34%, and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) predicted in a 2006 report that members of this group roughly 250,000 active physicians will retire by 2020. The shortage of surgeons is part of a larger shortage of medical professionals that has been recognized as a threat for more than five years. Thomas Russell, executive director of the American College of Surgeons, says there are not enough new doctors going into general surgery. Surgeons “have no one to sign off to, they are on call all the time,” Russell says. “They burn out after doing this year after year.” H. Darr Besler. “Shortage of surgeons pinches U.S. hospitals” USA Today February 26, 2008, natl. ed: 2A.

On July 11, 2000, FDA approved the first completely robotic surgery device, the DaVinci surgical system. The FDA recognizes surgical robotics as next-generation, advanced surgical instruments combined with already proven (less invasive) technology. Da Vinci is a computer-assisted robotic system that expands a surgeons capability to operate within the human body in a less invasive way. (www.mdnationwide.org) There is also another robot named Zeus. I have decided to write about robotic surgery. There are only a few states practicing robotic surgery; knowing this makes me concerned for future surgical employees and the shortage of surgeons. It is difficult for older patients to tolerate open-heart surgery and other mechanical treatment methods are more difficult to use than robotic surgery. A robot in the operating room does and will replace key personnel. Pro, Robotic systems, which are just beginning to catch on across the country, allow surgeons to be more precise in their movements, able to perform delicate surgeries more precisely and less invasively.

Stephen Strup, director of minimally invasive urological surgery at UK, says “I do worry a little bit about this ease of learning, because I don’t know whether we’re skipping over skills that are valuable for surgeons to master. We can’t trust this system so much that we forget how to pick up the standard instruments and do a procedure the ‘old’ way.” (www.research.uky.edu) A con for robotic surgery: Chand Ramaiah , an assistant professor in UK’s cardiothoracic surgery division, says he admits that robotic surgery has some downsides. The surgeon has no tactical feedback, he says, and there are some surgeries the system can’t handle. Da Vinci can’t be used for certain operations on the heart, like aortic valve replacement, and isn’t practical to use to do heart transplant, since with transplants the chest has to be open anyway.(www.research.uky.edu) A pro for robotic surgery: Dr. Mehran Anvari, director of the Centre for Minimal Access Surgery (CMAS) says "Our target is to complete this project in the next five years, the portable robotic unit would be used in space missions, war zones and other environments where access to surgeons is extremely difficult. It may also be used in remote regions of the Canadian North, [from] where the government spends millions of dollars to transport patients to city hospitals." (www.ZDNet.com)

Robotic surgery is also known as cyber surgery. The complexity of litigation associated with robotic surgery and cyber surgery. Litigation after cyber surgery, remote robotic surgery, will be complex. In addition to being able to sue physicians and hospitals, patients who sustain an adverse outcome after cyber surgery will have the potential to sue the robotic manufacturer and the telecommunications company. Nevertheless, cyber surgery litigation will involve laws that are generally unfamiliar to healthcare providers. (www3.interscience.wiley.com)

There are not too many cases on robotic surgery malpractice, a lot of the cases have been hard to prove whether it was the surgeon or the fault of the manufacture that made the robot. Over the next few years robotic or cyber surgery will be in practice on a broader scale and lawsuits will eventually follow.

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