We forget that until recently, nearly all surgery was defined by the Big Cut.
To fix something as routine as a gallstone or a hernia, a surgeon had to create a new, secondary trauma, a six-inch incision through muscle and nerve. In many cases, the treatment was so physically taxing that patients would wait until a crisis to seek help. They chose chronic pain over the violence of the operating table.
This is a central conundrum of medicine and plans of treatment: When does the treatment stop being a frightening addition to the disease?
When the laparoscopic cholecystectomy—the ability to operate through a keyhole—emerged in 1988, a whole category of ailments suddenly could be reliably remedied with significantly less trauma and recovery.
It begs a broader question in modern medical innovation: where else can we make it less painful to be healthy?
Dr. Eddie Joe Reddick and Dr. Douglas Olsen performed the first laparoscopic cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal) in the United States at Baptist Hospital in Nashville.
Twenty-five health innovations that changed the world.
By reducing the physical cost of surgery, we fundamentally changed who could be a patient. The elderly and the frail, who might not have survived a major open-cavity procedure, could now be treated safely. The cost of proactive and early intervention has gone down. The bar for health has gone up.