Combining education with entertainment and patient care with promotion, live telesurgery is a fixture at surgical conferences and marketing campaigns by hospitals and medical device manufacturers. It's natural that conference attendees want to see the best surgeons performing the most advanced procedures with the newest equipment. There's no inherent reason why they need to watch it happen live—a narrated DVD would provide the same or better educational experience, with mundane sections eliminated and critical points in the surgery highlighted. But try telling that to conference organizers who know that live telesurgery is, rationally or not, a high point of many conferences.A case of advertising, the human desire for entertainment, the surgeons need to prove themselves, and the spectators need to believe that others make the same mistakes that they do have fed into this developing trend. What remains unclear is whether the interests of the patient are best served by a distracted surgeon and an eager audience. Certainly the use of expert surgeons to teach others is invaluable, especially when the alternative might be to travel hundreds of miles to scrub in for a procedure. But the level of multitasking and distraction apparent in media oriented surgery can be disconcerting. Whether telesurgery will replace physical observation as the 21st century equivalent remains to be seen.
Michael Shusterman is the Editor in Chief of TuftScope (2009 - 2010).
Posts
