The diagnosis of lung cancer is often so frightening because many times, it isn’t found until the cancer is at a late stage. But thoracic surgeons at Toronto General Hospital, University Health Network, are now changing that through the use of a robotic surgical system to treat early-stage lung cancer when it is found by removing the cancer, along with a lobe of the lung, according to a story at News Medical, a medical Web site.
Pretty funny. While Texas lawmakers push on in their fight against the federal government's new health care law, the state's insurance department is moving ahead with a schedule to put it into practice, according to a story by Tim Eaton at the American-Statesman. Texas has plenty of company. More than half the states in the country are fighting the law, according to CNN’s Jack Cafferty. According to Eaton, Katrina Daniel, an associate commissioner with the Texas Department of Insurance, testifying, “Monday before a joint hearing of the state House's insurance and public health committees,” discussed the ways in which the department is launching the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in Texas.
The “green” movement is everywhere. Green houses. Green cars. Now green medical devices? The real benefit is that these new devices could save lots of energy while still performing the same functions as before. Texas Instruments has announced it’s working with manufacturers of medical devices and sports accessories to create some of these new types of energy-efficient products, according to an executive at the company, as reported in a story by Sinead Carew.
Robotic-assisted surgery has been around for a while, but up till now, it’s never been performed with just one incision. Yet that’s what happened at Beaumont Hospital in Troy, Mich., where on Feb. 22, a team of surgeons removed a gallbladder with just a single incision, the first time ever for robotic surgery, according to a story by Andrew Choi. The surgery left no scars and was performed through the belly button with a laparoscopic cholecystectomy, according to Choi.
A hospital in Houston last Tuesday morning “livetweeted a beating heart double bypass operation on a 57-year-old male patient on its official Twitter account, @houstonhospital,” according to a story by Taylor Hatmaker at Tecca as posted at news.yahoo.com.
The Memorial Hermann Medical Center team even set up a hashtag, #mhopenheart, to invite those watching to tweet questions to a cardiologist during the procedure, and for those not too squeamish to watch, even offered a video feed (over a helmet cam) to tune in live, according to the story.
