Article - Quality of Life and PCa Treatments

Thank you for posting the link to this article.

Zen9

Barry, good link. Good info.

Thought robotic surgery is definitely the way to go for most prostate surgery, I had seen hints before, that some of its merits are being oversold by doctors and hospitals. The bleeding issue in our day and age with open surgery is not a large risk, many open surgeries are down without requiring any extra blood needed, even if it were banked ahead of time. I know my open surgery was that way. Since hospital stays are so expensive, its kind of hard to argue which saves money, one day with robotic or up to four days with open. I needed 4 1/2 days due to complications and the need to be on hospital dispensed pain meds, but there are men that have open surgery that go home after only 2 days. So not convinced that alone is a good selling point.

I am not saying one is better than the other, either. Just concerned its being pushed to pay for the hardware costs, which are huge. And there are plenty of good, old school surgeons, like my guy, that like to get their hands inside you. He said the supposed magnication advantage with robotics is over played, as he wears lit and magnified head sets while operating open.

Good article though

David in SC

Barry, still comes down to a point that I feel 99.9% of us here at HW agree with. It's not the mode, its the surgeon. And I think the point of how many he/she has done gets overplayed too, that is but one factor. How about the quality of their surgical skills, not just the shear number of them. A surgeon that has only done 200-500 quality surgeries may be much better than one that cranked out 2,000. The higher number doesn't prove the surgeon learned anything better or learned from his mistakes. Hopefully he did, and its good extra experience.

And then of course, what is the condition of his patient's let's say a full year later.

If that data were available and accurate, I think there might be some surprises for people to learn about. Even in our small group, we have an unfortunate few, that went to the best of the best, and didn't get good results, either in eradicating their cancer, or quality of life issues.

On the personal side, I never like to push open or robotic. At the time of my surgery, only 15 robotic PC ops had been done in my area, on a new robot. That surgeon was a partner of my uro/surgeon, and my own dr. said to stay away, as the learning curve was just starting.
So I went for the obvious, open with a lot of experience. In the end, due to complications in my prostate bed, my surgeon said that robotic never would have worked, and had it been chosen, it would had to have been converted to an open procedure anyhow.

No matter how smart we think we become here and elsewhere learning this and that, and I am a big believer in the "due diligence" part and the "buyer beware" aspect (been in the biz world too long, lol), when push comes to shove, we all have to make complex and major medical decisions to the best of our abilities, and there is always a certain gamble, roll of the dice, chance, or whatever other adjective someone choose to use when we make these huge decisions.

Then what happens, happens, and like the rest of humanity, we learn to deal with it, and learn to adapt and compensate for problems.
Such is life.

My best to you

David

Thanks