Spain sees the first lung transplant performed by robot | Hacker News Reader

Spain sees the first lung transplant performed by robot

euronews.com

17 pointsawb5 comments

It's amazing to me how much less invasive some surgeries have become nowadays. I have some people close to me who I thought would require months of recovery get fixed up in mere weeks. It seems like one of those fields where advances have been happening quietly for decades.

> Spain is a world leader in organ transplants, according to figures from the Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation, performing 5 per cent of organ donations worldwide in 2021.

This surprised me, too. I wondered what the factors were in Spain succeeding at this. This article gives some ideas: https://www.thelocal.es/20170915/how-spain-became-world-lead...

The major contributing factors seem to be a good donor coordination system, automatic organ donor registration, and a slightly more permissive regime for organ donor eligibility.

I used to deliver food to patients at a hospital. There was a guy there who was waiting for a lung transplant for a couple of years who I got to know. There were a couple times where he was close to getting it but it didn't work out for whatever reason until one day he was gone, and I assumed the worst.

But I saw him again. He got his transplant on a Wednesday, he said he was sitting up by Friday and on Saturday I was serving him food. Like, it wasn't solid food, it was pureed, but it was real food not the soylent type stuff in a can that I'd serve other people.

It blew my mind to know how fast a person could recover from that. He said they gave him a new heart too. Only later did I learn the truth that lung transplant recipients usually don't make it to a decade. something about the immune system damaging the transplanted lungs, tissue scarring, stuff like that. That broke my heart.

What I took away from that is that we spend so many resources just keeping people barely alive, and that once we unlock the ability to grow perfect organs that everything in our society will change.

No more dialysis units with people suffering just barely alive, unable to work, and teams of people keeping in that state. Alcoholics who fuck up their livers and lives can have a real second chance (or third...) and then we can put those resources that we spend just keeping people alive towards curing other diseases.

There's so much shit in the world and in many ways it just seems to be getting worse and when it gets me down I just have to remember that once we can grow organs everything in our society will change.

Small incisions changed also traumatology in the last years. There is not need anymore to cut open and make a big scar for accessing the shoulder for example. Is a big improvement also for the newest generations of human surgeons.

My dad had a heart valve replacement at the start of the year, they went in through an artery near the groin and did the whole op from there. He was home 24 hours later, absolutely incredible.

The concept of robotic surgery is mind blowing. Well done Spain.

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