According to Dr. Kernstine, thoracic surgery used to keep the patient in the hospital for a week to two weeks. He says minimally invasive technology has allowed the physician to “go right into the esophagus, make a small hole in it, remove the mass, sew it up.” He says this allows the patient to go home on the day of surgery.
“These things may be able to be done as an outpatient in the future,” he said. “Even without putting patients to sleep, a lot of the reasons we did a lot of those things, is that we had to do big incisions. I think the evolution of this, as we get better and better [and] we put more research funding into this, this is going to be even better for the future.”
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