• Question: whats a keyhole surgery??

    Asked by shoque97 to Amelia, Jim, Liz, Prateek, Richard on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Amelia Markey

      Amelia Markey answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      keyhole surgery is where they make a tiny incision (cut) into the patient in order to perform the operation rather than opening the patient up. The point behind keyhole surgery is to minimise infection, scarring and the recovery time of the patient.

      Here’s a link if you want to learn more about it:

      http://www.keyholesurgery.net/Keyhole%20Surgery/keyholesurgery.html

    • Photo: Jim Caryl

      Jim Caryl answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      So where have you heard this term before? 😉

      We also have types of surgery now that can be performed without even making an incision in the skin. There are ways you might take a drug against cancerous cells, and introduce these into the blood. This drug whizzes around and whilst it may bind to some healthy cells, it will concentrate in the cancerous tumour. Importantly, this drug does no damage to the cells until activated – which is good news for the healthy cells.

      So how do you activate it? Well, attached to the drug molecule is a ‘trigger switch’ (on a very small one) and this is triggered by shining a light on it – not just any light, but a red light with a very specific wavelength. The thing about red light is that if it is bright enough, it can pass through body tissues. So if you know where the tumour is, and it has soaked up lots of the drug, you shine a light over the position of the tumour to activate the medicine and only the tumour cells are destroyed – not the healthy cells, which is what traditionally makes people ill when taking cancer drugs.

      Pretty neat eh? Whether this is actively being used yet I’m not sure, but I’ve seen models and demonstrations at conferences for several years now. I’m quite interested in this approach as we could use a similar method for the targeted treatment of bacterial infections deep inside the body – and it would prevent having to use antibiotics that kill many of your good bacteria (which are needed to keep you healthy) and target only the bad ones causing the infection.

Comments