Robots That Kill
I've been writing about healthcare technology for a while and one of the areas I've focused on is how robotic surgery is changing the face of medicine. Well, maybe not so much. The big pluses were supposed to be that it was non-invasive, required only a single incision, people healed faster, there was less blood loss, and its outcomes were supposed to justify the cost (sometimes twice "open surgery"). Only, a major study just recently found that outcomes are no better with this type of surgery, and can sometimes even kill you, according to a story in today's NYT by Roni Caryn Rabin. This kind of surgery is typically used for prostatectomies and hysterectomies (my own OB-GYN performs them this way). How it works is that the surgeon sits at a console in the operating room connected to a camera that provides a high-definition picture of the surgical site, then moves the robotic arms to mimic what his own hands would be doing, based on the camera image. Sou