You’ve joined the millions of men who have received a diagnosis of prostate cancer — there will be nearly 314,000 diagnoses in the United States in 2025 alone. Cancer of any kind is scary enough, but now you’re adding surgery to the mix in the form of a prostatectomy.
Each year in the United States, about 90,000 prostatectomies are performed, and a majority of them are performed using robotic surgical technology. And this is good news, as robotic surgery is improving outcomes and easing recovery.
At Arizona Urology, our team was among the early adopters of the da Vinci® robotic-assisted urology procedures, and our patients have benefited ever since.
Since September is Prostate Cancer Awareness Month in the US, we want to take this opportunity to review the benefits of removing your prostate using robotic technology.
If you’re imagining an operating room with nothing but a robot moving around and performing the surgery, that’s not at all what’s happening.
The daVinci system includes a console where one of our surgeons sits to control the robotic arms that perform your prostatectomy. This console has a monitor to guide our surgeon with a high-definition view of the surgical site.
The robotic arms are on a cart that sits next to your operating table, and these arms are monitored by OR staff the entire time.
What this means is that human expertise and experience guide your prostatectomy the entire time.
Human hands are precisely that — human — which means they have limitations. One of the great benefits of robotic-assisted surgery is that the robotic arms offer more precision and accuracy than human hands, especially in tighter spaces.
Another great benefit is that our surgeon has a much more detailed view of the surgical site thanks to a camera that sends magnified and high-definition images to a monitor. In fact, we can magnify the image by 10 times or more, which gives us a far more accurate visual to work with.
Anytime we use our da Vinci surgical system, we’re taking a minimally invasive approach, which means much smaller incisions. Since we don’t need visual or manual access to your prostate, we only make tiny incisions in your lower abdomen through which we thread the camera and robotic instruments.
This allows us to take a path of least resistance and minimize collateral tissue damage.
Since there’s less collateral tissue damage during your robotic-assisted prostatectomy, your recovery is much improved because there’s:
This also translates to a shorter hospital stay, which means you can get home more quickly after your prostatectomy.
So, even though you’d rather not be in this position to begin with, we can improve your prostatectomy experience from start to finish with our da Vinci robotic-assisted system.
If you have more questions about robotic surgery or your prostatectomy, we invite you to contact us at one of our offices in Phoenix, Goodyear, Gilbert, and Glendale, Arizona, today to schedule an appointment.
