In our clinic, we often meet patients who ask if minimally invasive surgery is possible to treat inguinal hernia. After receiving a positive answer from us, they immediately ask for further confirmation: “Is minimally invasive surgery just a shot?” At this point, our doctors often have to spend a lot of energy explaining to them that true minimally invasive surgery is not just a shot, but that laparoscopic hernia repair is the minimally invasive surgery to cure an inguinal hernia. We have already talked about laparoscopy more thoroughly in many previous articles on the subject. Today we will mainly focus on the harmful injection method (the so-called “one needle spirit”) and pick up its true nature. Inguinal hernia injection therapy, commonly known as “one shot”, was popular in Europe and the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. The theory is that a sclerosing agent or binder (such as glycerol petrolatum, sodium cod liver oil, compound quinine, medical glue, etc.) is injected into the hernia ring and inguinal canal. The sclerosing agent, when injected into the body, undergoes a physico-chemical reaction and hardens rapidly like cement, thus bonding the local muscles and fascia together to block the protrusion of the hernia contents, thus providing a therapeutic effect. However, its drawbacks were soon discovered: 1. Injection therapy is very blind. It is difficult to locate accurately, either with bare hands or under ultrasound guidance. 2, injection often leads to injury or adhesion of the spermatic vessels, vas deferens, affecting fertility, and in severe cases, even ischemic orchitis leading to testicular atrophy, which is self-evident to men with fertility requirements. 3, if the sclerosing agent injection into the abdominal cavity by mistake, intestinal cavity, may lead to intestinal adhesions, intestinal obstruction, intestinal necrosis and other serious complications, or mistakenly into the femoral vessels causing lower extremity vascular embolism, these complications can even endanger the lives of patients . 4, after the failure of injection therapy, the need for surgery, due to complete change in the local anatomical structure, tissue hard as cement, will lead to intraoperative anatomical difficulties, bleeding, postoperative pain The chances of pain, hematoma and infection should also be greatly increased. For these reasons, injection therapy was completely banned abroad in the 1960s and 1970s. However, in recent years, this treatment method has made a comeback in China under the banner of minimally invasive treatment. In fact, careful readers can easily find that this treatment is often carried out by some informal medical institutions or small private clinics. They take advantage of some patients’ fear of surgery and greed for cheapness to take advantage of the situation. In fact, hernia repair surgery is very mature nowadays, both laparoscopic and open surgery are safe and fast, and usually patients can be discharged from the hospital in a day or two after surgery, with minimal impact on their daily work and life. We call on all patients to be vigilant when choosing medical institutions and treatment options, and to keep their eyes open so that they do not lose out because of the smallness.