Will the surgeon of the future be C-3PO or R2D2?
At a time when driverless cars are cruising down American highways… and you can have full-on conversations with computerized “personal assistants” with names like Siri and Alexa… just about anything seems possible!
And that might be exactly the direction we’re headed, because the FDA has recently approved a new robotic device – a surgical scope called the Monarch – that a doctor (for now, anyway) will steer into a patient’s lungs to look for cancer.
But the scientist behind this new invention has much bigger plans for it as an “independent operator” – doctors not required.
While fully robotic surgery sounds rather frightening (remember HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey?), scientists are trying to assure us that it will be nothing more than the super-safe evolution of modern medicine. But can we really believe that?
Driverless cars can crash, and one such crash recently killed a pedestrian in Arizona.
And even the robotic surgeries that go on today, which are still controlled by doctors, have crashed many times – even though you’ve probably never heard about it, as such “incidents” are frequently kept a deep, dark secret.
So, whether we’re talking about the medical robots of the future or the ones that are already in the OR, there are some important things you need to know.
Paging Dr. Robot
The robots of today don’t really resemble their depictions in movies and TV.
Rosie, the robotic maid from The Jetsons, hasn’t made an appearance yet, and while Alexa can respond to commands, “she” sure doesn’t resemble any of the droids from Star Wars!
These days, actual robotic inventions look more like giant machines. And in the case of the Monarch, one with a snake-like tube that winds its way throughout the lungs, the machine is manipulated by a surgeon using a controller that’s similar to what you might use to play a video game.
The man behind Monarch, Fred Moll, makes no secret, however, of the fact that his real plans are to develop the device further so that it can go solo.
“It’s not science fiction,” Moll says, pointing to how self-driving cars have recently become part of our reality.
And his Dr. Robot won’t take a decade to hit the operating room, either – just a couple more years, he promises.
But should we be trusting our lives to one of these well-programmed machines? Even one with a doctor sitting behind the controls?
You’ve probably heard about the da Vinci surgical system, a machine that “performs” procedures without doctors needing to even touch their patients.
Back almost two decades ago, before the FDA first approved the device, it asked Intuitive Surgical, the company that manufactures the da Vinci, for exact details on how doctors would be trained in the complexities of using it. After all, this isn’t a smartphone we’re talking about… you can’t use it to Google an answer!
But in the rush to get these million-dollar robots into the OR, what was supposed to have been a 70-item exam and a three-day hands-on training workshop boiled down to a 10-question online test and one day’s training at company headquarters.
That was just two years after the da Vinci was approved, so who knows what it’s been reduced to by now?
Of course, one of the big safety problems with having a da Vinci in the OR is that without extensive training, docs can make some big mistakes. Plus, the robot can have its own issues, which aren’t often reported to the FDA.
The computer has malfunctioned… and patients have suffered burns, been sliced and diced where they shouldn’t have been, and died due to botched operations.
And all along, the FDA has been approving more and more surgical procedures that can be performed using da Vinci. In fact, at this point, it’s just about everything and anything you can think of — from hysterectomies to heart operations to eye and prostate surgeries.
But are we now ready for these devices to totally take control and hold our lives in their robotic hands?
While we’ll no longer have to worry about how well the surgeon slept the night before, there are bound to be some missing elements.
As much as you’ll see me call out docs for their shortcomings here in eAlert, I’ll take a living, breathing human being over a machine any day – at least, until they can build robots with some humanity.
For now, with all of their flaws, human surgeons are still the only ones who can perform procedures and provide intuition, experience, skill, and that little undefinable extra that only a person can have: compassion.
“Robots could replace surgeons in the battle against cancer” Max Chafkin, March 23, 2018, Bloomberg, Bloomberg.com
