A team of doctors at RG Stone And Super Speciality Hospital successfully performed a highly advanced needloscopy operation on three and a half-year-old girl, Anisha for removal of gall stones. It was the first surgical procedure of its kind in Punjab.
The surgery is known as “micro-invasive laparoscopic cholecystectomy or needloscopy” was performed by Dr. H.S. Jolly, Chief Laparoscopic Surgeon at the centre, who was assisted by Dr. Anand Sehgal, Urologist, and Dr. Bhupinder Pal Singh, Consultant Anesthesiologist.
Dr. Jolly informed that Anisha had been complaining of pain in the abdomen for close to a year but all medications had failed to help her. With time, she also developed recurrent nausea and vomiting along with generalised weakness. As her symptoms worsened, her parents brought her to the city hospital.
“Thorough examination and investigations revealed that Anisha had a stone in her gall bladder, which was the reason for her agony. She was admitted to the hospital on May 8 where the child underwent needloscopy on May 9. In this procedure, a state-of-the-art miniature laparoscope (4 mm), also known as needloscope, was used and only three very small holes of 5 mm were made through the abdomen. After 72 hours of observation, the patient was found to have fully recovered.”
Dr. Jolly said gall stones were earlier treated conventionally by open cholecystectomy, but with the development of laparoscopy and minimally invasive surgical techniques, laparoscopic cholecystectomy was the treatment of choice even in children. Dr. Jolly claimed that the advantages of needloscopy over the routine laparoscopic surgery were invisible scar, lesser hospital stay, lesser pain, and lesser requirement of medication.
Moreover, the minimally invasive surgery, or for that matter a procedure like needloscopy, was not that expensive and cost almost the same as traditional surgery, if shorter stay in the hospital and fast recovery were taken into consideration.
