Articles

Less Pain, Quicker Recovery from Surgery

From To Your Health, MidMichigan Health, September/October 2005 Issue

A comprehensive minimally invasive thoracic surgery program is now available at MidMichigan Medical Center in Midland, making MidMichigan the first in the region to have such a program. Extensive use of video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS) will someday be the best approach for the majority of these procedures, and MidMichigan is paving the way.

MidMichigan has done thoracic surgery for more than 18 years. In the past few months, however, the emphasis has shifted to perform the same procedures using smaller incisions, pain-reducing techniques and advanced technologies.

Traditional surgeries of the chest require surgeons to make large incisions from the side all the way to the back. To remove any portion of the lung, the ribs are spread and often cracked, creating intense postoperative pain for patients.

Now, in patients with tumors smaller than 2 1/2 inches and not involving the chest wall, the same operations can be performed with one 4-inch incision and two or three 1-inch incisions.
The viewing scopes used for the operation are small (about 3/8 inch) but give optimal viewing of the entire chest cavity.

A major benefit is that the hospital stay is shorter, dropping to two to three days from five to seven days. Along with pain being significantly reduced, rehabilitation time is much shorter.
Initially the recurrence rate and completeness of resection of diseased tissue following minimally invasive surgeries were not thought to measure up to the more conventional approaches. But recent data shows that this is not the case. Now, the same results and thoroughness that traditional techniques have offered are possible but with much less pain for the patient.

World-Class Thoracic Surgery

What places MidMichigan's program in an elite league is that it represents a very small but growing population of programs in the world performing minimally invasive chest surgery. Very few centers are offering minimally invasive thoracic surgery because it required a radical change in the surgical orientation traditionally taught in most training centers.

"We are convinced that the proper approach all surgeries of the chest should take is toward a minimally invasive and pain-free ideal," says Robert N. Jones, MD, MidMichigan's thoracic surgeon and chief surgical officer or Michigan CardioVascular Institute. "We are very excited about this program and are pleased to offer it to the patients we serve."

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