The Advantages of Robotic Hysterectomy

This video by TV360 explains the advantages of robotic hysterectomy and how this procedure takes place.

As Ronnie had mentioned, her recovery was much better, much shorter, much faster than she had expected given what she had seen. Friends go through and they had a hysterectomy. In her case she was able to go home the next day, never really needed any use of narcotics, never had any significant pain and was up and about within a couple of days. It’s pretty typical for people who have a hysterectomy with the robot, compared to traditional surgery. So when considering a hysterectomy, when you compare the robotic hysterectomy compared to traditional hysterectomy, there are a number of advantages, first of all, the recovery time is significantly less. Most people with the robotic hysterectomy are able to go home within 24 hours, sometimes even less. Also their need for pain medication are significantly less. The majority of the time, it’s typical for patients who only need ibuprofen rather than needing narcotic agents and so this just gives them an easier recovery even within the first couple of days after surgery. And in terms of longer term recovery time, most patients are able to be back and up doing their normal routine back at work, back to normal activity within one to two weeks. Whereas with the traditional hysterectomy, it’s more of the order of four to six weeks and most of this is due to the fact that with the traditional hysterectomy, the incision is much larger than the one centimeter or dime sized incisions that we need to make with the robot. So Ronnie was an excellent candidate for the robotic hysterectomy because in addition to having the prolapsed uterus, she also had a mask on her ovary. At the time that we evaluated her in the office on ultrasound, it wasn’t clear if this mask was benign or malignant. And so with the robot, what we do is we initially enter the abdomen with the cameras. In her case we actually removed that ovary and sent it to pathology to be evaluated. Fortunately it was benign and so we proceeded with the hysterectomy as we have planned. One of the main advantages of the robot is the wide variety of procedures that we’re able to do with the robot, ranging from malignant cancer procedures to benign procedures such as hysterectomies for fibroids or for abnormal bleeding or for pain. Some people aren’t going to be good candidates for a robotic hysterectomy and those would be individuals that have very, very large uteri that would make it just inaccessible or if they have significant scarring from prior surgeries such as caesarian sections or endometriosis or other surgeries in the past. One of the misconceptions about robotic surgery is that the robot or the computer is controlling part of the surgery. And that’s actually not true. The surgeon is actually present 100% of the time at the console right next to the patient and the surgeon is actually controlling all of the instrumentation through the manual controls. So the robot is never actually performing any part of the surgery without immediate control by the surgeon.