Surgeon Removes Gallbladder Through Patient's Mouth

The old-fashioned method of gallbladder surgery can make for a very painful experience. But surgeons at Northwestern Memorial Hospital performed a painless gallbladder removal by removing the gallbladder through the patient's mouth. This is a very rare procedure known as "laparoscopic assisted natural orifice translumenal endoscopic surgery" or NOTES for short. The procedure is being referred as groundbreaking and leading the way to other incision-less procedures.

It has the potential to lessen the amount of pain and other side effects of the traditional surgery and it may also lessen the recovery time to as little as one day.

There are many reasons why surgeons are showing so much interest in this type of procedure. First of all, the stomach and the GI tract do not have that many nerves and that means they do not register that much pain. Someday this fact may enable the surgeon to perform a NOTES operation just using sedation instead of general anesthesia. Another plus side to NOTES is there will be no post operative wound to become infected, or to develop a hernia.

It will speed recovery, would greatly reduce costs and the amount of pain.

Even thought the operation itself is very new, the idea has been floating around the medical community for years. Up until now the surgery was impossible because the endoscopic devices that are currently available do not have a platform for it. By using a stable operation platform, the surgeon can move the instruments around to allow him to view, then cut, then grab and then suture tissue without making any incisions in the skin. Imagine surgery with no scars and very little pain.

There are risks with this as there is with any surgical procedure. The main one is being able to properly suture the incision that is made in the stomach. If it is not closed properly, there could be complications.

They do need some very special equipment and the ones that they used are the EndoSurgical Operating System by USGI Medical and additional endoscopic equipment made by Olympus.