Benefits of Minimally Invasive Surgery

Traditional open surgery means the surgeon must cut through skin, tissue, and often muscle to open up the body section to perform the treatment required for the disease or condition. Depending on the area of the body, some types of highly complex surgeries require blood transfusions to replace blood lost during surgery.

Cut muscles mean more time is required for the muscles to heal after surgery. Longer use of pain medications may be required during the healing process. All these issues of traditional open surgery have been improved through the development of minimally invasive surgery:

• Amount of blood lost during surgery is reduced
• Muscles are not cut but gently moved aside
• Length of skin and tissue incision is reduced

These reductions in physical trauma to the body area during surgery serve to:

• Reduce incision-related infection rates after surgery
• Reduce incision-related pain after surgery, thereby reducing the amount of pain medications needed for relief and shortening the length of time for use of pain medications
• Shortened hospital stay or no hospital stay
• Faster healing, recovery, and return to daily life activities

For example, whereas removal of an inflamed gallbladder using the open surgical procedure requires a three to five day stay in the hospital and 6-week recovery at home, such patients undergoing the minimally invasive approach are home the same day and back to work within one to two weeks.