Often, surgery provides the best road forward to good health, but this type of intervention hasn’t always been an easy one. Thanks to the advent of minimally invasive surgical techniques, however, we can offer some key advantages over open surgery.
Thanks to minimally invasive surgical techniques, Dr. Fernando Otero and the team here at Women’s Clinic of the Rio Grande Valley are better able to address women’s health care concerns.
In this month’s blog post, we review five of the more significant advantages of minimally invasive surgery.
Traditionally, surgeons needed to perform open surgery to obtain visual and manual access to the surgical site. Today, we turn to laparoscopy — a technique in which we use a tiny, specialized camera to provide us with visuals — and specialized instruments that translate the movements of our hands in smaller spaces.
As a result, we thread the laparoscopy equipment through very small incisions, instead of large ones needed for open surgery. This means there’s far less collateral tissue damage and less bleeding than there was with open surgery.
When you underwent open surgery, you could count on a hospital stay for at least a few days. With our minimally invasive techniques, not only are hospital stays reduced, they’re sometimes eliminated altogether as you can often go home the same day.
Of course, this depends on the procedure, but whether your hospital stay is reduced or eliminated, you can be back in the comfort of your own home more quickly.
Thanks to the small incisions, your recovery time after a minimally invasive surgery is greatly reduced. For example, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists reports that after a total laparoscopic hysterectomy, postoperative recovery is reduced by two weeks.
When it comes to gynecologic applications, we can use minimally invasive surgical techniques for a number of issues, including:
Another role that laparoscopy can play is in helping us to diagnose problems in your reproductive organs. When we go in through your vagina with the laparoscope, we can take a look at the inner structures of your pelvis without causing any damage.
Whatever issue you’re facing, our minimally invasive surgical techniques allow you to return to your normal activities faster. Life passes by quickly, and our goal is that you spend your time in great health and not in recovery.
If you’d like to learn more about minimally invasive gynecologic procedures, contact one of our offices in McAllen or Edinburg, Texas, to schedule an appointment.
