The Beat Goes On
by Edward Edelson
Popular Science, March 2000
The latest trend in the medical profession is that of a refined
open-heart surgery.  In the days of old, doctors had to open a person's
entire rib cage to get at the parts of the heart they needed access to. 
Well, this has just been changed drastically.  Surgeons can now perform
the surgery without making large incisions.  In some cases, they don't
even have to stop the heart like they did in the past.
In this new method, which is called minimally invasive heart
surgery, the doctors insert little cameras into the patient's body so
that they can get all the angles that they used to.  The only difference
is that these cameras prevent the previous requirement that the entire
chest cavity needed to be opened.  By inserting these cameras, the
images of the inner body are projected on monitors around the operating
room so that the doctor can easily see what is going on.  However, one
other thing has to be done in order to have a successful operation.  A
small tube, called a catheter, has to be inserted through the groin and
threaded up through the stomach and attached to the heart.  This
prevents the doctors from having to completely shut down the heart,
because it reroutes the blood away from the heart.  This has drastically
decreased the death rate of older patients during heart surgery.  Many
elderly individuals who have heart surgery have to have their heart
shocked into working order again and this causes many of them to have
massive strokes.  In recent years, this has become a very real problem
and people in the medical field have decided that they needed to do
something about it.  This is where the bypass came in.  Using this
procedure, the doctors were able to clamp the arteries going to and from
the heart.  This will prevent the patient from having to undergo shock
therapy to get everything pumping again.
This procedure has endless benefits.  Not only are the scars
smaller and less noticeable, but the patients are expected to have a
shorter hospital stay, a quicker recovery and are able to go back to
work sooner.  Another major benefit to this operation is that the entire
thing costs thousands less than normal heart surgery.  However, many
hospitals have yet to adopt this method. because it takes extensive
training and very expensive equipment.  The good news is that the
expected growth in popularity of the surgery will probably convince most
surgeons to use the method within the next few years.