Turning surgery inside out

摘要

Which would you prefer: a surgical procedure that left you in pain, incapacitated and scarred, or one that was virtually painless, involved no recovery time and left no visible scar at all? It may sound too good to be true, but a radical improvement in surgery is the promise held out by a hew technique, called "natural-orifice translumenal endosurgery", or NOTES. Rather than operating on the abdomen by making incisions in the skin, it involves passing flexible instruments through the body's orifices and entering the abdomen from the inside.