What is minimally invasive weight loss surgery?

  Minimally invasive surgery, as the name implies, is surgery that is minimally invasive, as opposed to “minor” surgery, which involves the removal of only minor problems. Today’s fashionable laparoscopic, endoscopic, and robotic surgery all fall into this category. Minimally invasive surgery is now the new mainstream of global surgical development, and has been widely used in a variety of surgical fields.  The most mature technique is laparoscopic surgery. In the past, this technique was commonly used in gynecology and gallbladder surgery. However, in the last decade or so, this technique has been expanded to include various gastrointestinal, abdominal wall, endocrine, and other procedures. In contrast to “traditional open” surgery, in which the surgeon uses a single large incision to enter the abdominal cavity, laparoscopic surgery uses one to several small incisions of 0.5 to 1.5 centimeters, with various trocar devices inserted into each opening, and special instruments and laparoscopic imaging lenses are passed through the trocar into the abdominal cavity to perform the surgery. At the beginning of the laparoscopic procedure, the abdominal cavity is inflated with carbon dioxide to provide space for the surgeon to work and see, and the laparoscopic imaging lens transmits the images to a high resolution monitor in the operating room.  Current mainstream weight loss procedures include gastric diversion, an option to redecorate the gastrointestinal tract pattern, and gastric sleeve resection, another procedure to slim down the stomach. Since the main problem of patients who want to undergo surgery is obesity, often with huge body size, and may also be combined with hypertension, hyperlipidemia, hyperglycemia and many other problems, if traditional open surgery is used, not only is the incision huge, but more importantly, the operation takes a long time, the risk of anesthesia is high, and the postoperative recovery is slow, bringing a much higher risk of surgical complications, causing great pain to patients, which also makes patients who originally wanted to have surgery This also makes patients who originally wanted to undergo surgery feel timid.  The advantages of minimally invasive surgery make up for these shortcomings, as it has a small incision and basically leaves no scars; the pain is light, and postoperative pain is greatly reduced, so the psychological pressure on the patient is also reduced. The recovery is fast, often able to get out of bed the day after surgery and integrate into normal life and work as early as possible; the hospital stay is short; the intraoperative bleeding is low, the field of vision of minimally invasive surgery is clearer, the vascular treatment will be more delicate, plus the use of ultrasonic knife and other advanced hemostatic instruments, which helps reduce the amount of bleeding. Moreover, the incidence of various postoperative surgical complications is greatly reduced. Therefore, it can be precisely tailored for patients who want to undergo weight loss surgery.  The fact that weight loss surgery is done in a minimally invasive way does not affect the post-operative weight loss efficacy, but on the contrary, the surgeon works more calmly, observes more carefully during the operation, and guarantees more safety, which can be said to be a fourfold increase. “Small knife trauma, big knife healing.”