It's time to remove the appendix... from the mouth.

Imagine a surgical procedure performed without general anesthesia, requiring virtually no recovery time, and leaving no visible scars. However, there are some caveats: a rather unpleasant taste may linger in your mouth for a while, along with a piece of your spleen, prostate, or gallbladder. Transgastric surgery, which means surgery performed through the stomach (this type of surgery also has the official name Natural orifice translumenal endosurgery (NOTES)), involves inserting flexible surgical instruments and a video camera through the patient's mouth. This way, they reach the abdominal cavity. The doctor only needs to make a small puncture in the abdomen. When the surgery is complete, the surgeon removes the removed tissue and instruments back through the patient's mouth and places one, or at most two, stitches in the puncture. Some may find this procedure disgusting, while others find the claim of no post-operative scarring almost unbelievable. Be that as it may, these operations are already being performed. In the last couple of weeks alone, three independent surgical teams from Europe and the United States have reported that they have performed NOTES. And Indian doctors say they have already removed appendixes through the mouth several times. At the Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus, USA, several patients were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. This gave surgeons the opportunity to perform an operation to cut off the affected area through the mouth. And two women, one in New York and the other in Strasbourg, France, had their gallbladders removed using a slightly modified method: doctors entered the abdomen through an incision made in the vagina. Like any other surgery, NOTES carries a certain degree of risk, including the possibility of internal bleeding or postoperative pain caused by inflating the abdomen with carbon dioxide to make the surgeons' work easier. However, the success of such operations may open the door to their wider introduction into surgical practice. Without a doubt, this method has aesthetic value, since it leaves no traces of the doctors' work on the patients' bodies. "Even in cases where the operation is performed through a small puncture or incision, the patient remains "The patient is unable to work for at least several days," notes Lee Swanstrom, director of a clinic in Portland, Oregon, USA, which specializes in such gastrointestinal surgeries. "With NOTES, the patient can return to work the same day." And there is another undoubted advantage of surgeries performed through natural openings. The relatively mild pain that accompanies NOTES allows such procedures to be performed under a light sedative, rather than general anesthesia. Therefore, it is ideal for elderly or seriously ill patients for whom general anesthesia is contraindicated. Source: mignews.com