Is robotic surgery better?
The first robotic surgery was performed in the mid-1980s. Now thousands of operations are being done with the assistance of robots. A better term might be robotic instrumentation because, ultimately, there's always a human surgeon with his or her hands on the controls.
Even without robots, a lot of surgery is less hands-on than it used to be. For decades, surgeons have been doing many common abdominal operations with laparoscopes — tube-like instruments with video cameras on the ends — and long-handled surgical instruments. Surgeons watch magnified images on video monitors to see what they are doing so they can guide the surgical instruments.
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