They discovered that you have prostate cancer, your PSA numbers are creeping up, your Gleason Score is above a 7 or 8 and you just don’t want to live your life monitoring this cancer’s slow progression and likely spread. Wait long enough and you may be facing radiation and even chemo. So you decide to let them operate and remove it, most likely by the Da Vinci Robotic radical prostatectomy. That’s where the trouble begins. 

The Cleveland Clinic along with most other hospitals and surgeons that operate on the prostate using robotics will tell you “Robotic radical prostatectomy is a type of minimally invasive surgery which uses surgical robotic equipment to remove the entire prostate …. Further, robotic surgery provides 3D vision and precise direction that allow for nerve sparing.”  And so we see the big lie #2 — that its minimally invasive which allows for nerve sparing. False.

In case you missed the first prostate cancer blog article: Prostate – Lie #1 – Don’t do anything, let us monitor it

Robotic surgery is a nice toy for the surgeon. He sits in front of a computer monitor and manipulates what looks like octopus arms.

 

There are severe complications, as reported by Dr. Bert Vorstman MD including death, hemorrhaging, embolism, bowel and bladder problems, ureteral and nerve injuries, infections, hernias, pressure injuries to the eyes and muscles, foreign bodies, depression, suicide  and most likely damage to your ability to have erections and bladder control.

While they insist that this robotic radical robotic prostate removal surgery will perform “nerve sparing techniques”, that is absolutely not the case. At least 80% of men having this surgery will have moderate to severe nerve damage.  They don’t preserve the nerves nor do they bother incorporating nerve grafts.  This will not only affect you, but also your wife/partner.  The immediate result of nerve damage will be scar tissue forming in the erection tubes called the corpus cavernosa.  If they were to run an ultrasound on it, it would start looking like gray swiss cheese inside.  The secondary effect of the nerves being cut is that your body can no longer signal the increase in blood flow to the penis’s corpus cavernosa that would normally result in an erection. No blood flow, no retention of blood = no erection.

So the urologist surgeons make money on you three ways: they cut out the cancer with the robot, leave it limp and leaking requiring plenty of office visits with trials with pills or even injections, maybe even a prosthesis, which may or may not work and eventually like any mechanical device … will fail. So expect a lot more treatments and secondary major surgeries that may or may not correct the damage caused by this “minimally invasive” robotic prostatectomy.