have to crane your neck and squint your eyes to view the procedure
on a monitor that's up and over to the right and too far away.
"Do that 3 times a day for 20 years, and you'll really be sore," says
Howard Ross, MD, chief of colon and rectal surgery at Temple
University Hospital in Philadelphia, Pa. "You think of surgery as a gen-
tle art, but surgeons can be very, very sore by day's end."
Patients love the reduced pain and smaller incisions of minimally
invasive surgery, but a day of laparoscopy can be a grueling total body
workout for your surgeons. How are your surgeons coping with the
physical pain of practicing?
When his pinky and ring finger go numb during a longer case like a
colon resection, it feels like your hand fell asleep and you hit your
funny bone, says Sean Harbison, MD, a general surgeon at the
Hospitals of the University of Pennsylvania-Penn Presbyterian in
Philadelphia, Pa. In clinical terms, it's a median or an ulnar neuroprax-
ia from overstressing your wrists. In reality, it's just one of
laparoscopy's many aches and pains that can leave your surgeons feel-
ing sore, stiff or worse — pain can incapacitate surgeons, limit their
practice or shorten their careers.
"I know several surgeons who had to stop doing surgery because of
cervical disc problems," says Dr. Harbison. "They had to change their
whole professional trajectory. One became an ICU doctor."
After a day of 2 colon resections and 3 hemorrhoidectomies, Dr.
Ross can remember plenty of days when it hurt to lift his head or turn
to the side, when he had numb spots that lasted a week because he
was holding the instruments for so long.
Nowadays, he's much more aware of ergonomics in the OR. He
takes the time to set up the room so that his posture is good and his
body position is comfortable at all times during an operation — his
shoulder girdle relaxed, a slight bend in the elbow, a natural position
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