From surgery to science fiction

Carlos Lobos thought he'd never see da Vinci in real life. Not the Renaissance-era painter, but the new surgical system that's revolutionizing medicine.

Lobos, who works at Simply Wireless at Potomac Mills mall, had only seen the machine on the Discovery Channel. He was thrilled to see a da Vinci Surgical System on display at the mall. Even better, he could sit at the console and practice.

"I think it's the most interesting way of doing surgery," Lobos, 18, of Wood-bridge, said.

Lobos, who wants to be a doctor, said the machine can be more precise than a human hand and causes less scarring.

"It's an amazing machine," Lobos said. "I didn't think I'd ever see one live… just being able to play around with it is pretty awesome."

All afternoon on Sept. 26 Doctors Pratik S. Desai and Ek Seng Lou of Potomac Hospital let curi-ous visitors man the da Vinci controls and guide the robotic arms to manipulate small rubber bands and coins. September is prostate cancer awareness month -- the machine is primarily used to treat prostate cancer.

The machine looks like something out of Star Trek and could fill an entire office. And, yes, it's pretty cool to sit at the console and manipulate robotic arms about 10 feet away, to mix science fiction metaphors, the way Han Solo flies the Millennium Falcon. But there's noth-ing fictitious about da Vinci -- and what it means for men's health.

"The machine has no tactile sensation," Lou, a urologist, said. This means the ma-chine cannot feel the softness of tissue. A doctor must gauge by appearance rather than touch.

"A surgeon has to be a good surgeon in open surgery first," Lou, 67, of Triangle, said.

Desai, 36, a urologic oncologist, said the da Vinci technology has been used in America for the past four years. He started using it three years ago doing an oncology fellowship at Indiana Uni-versity.

"It's like nothing else you've seen," Desai said. "This is changing the way people are treated and the way they recover from this operation… Our patients leave the hospital within 24 hours of the surgery."

Before this procedure, Desai said patients had 10 times the blood loss, four times longer in the hospital and four times the narcotics.

"It's incredible, how it transformed that surgery," said Tammy Lewis, a regis-tered nurse who works with Lou and Desai.

Prostate cancer is a disease of aging, Desai said, the most common solid organ cancer in men. He added that it's readily treatable with early detection and men need to be screened for it starting at 50.

If a man has prostate cancer, the leading treatment is a prostatectomy and the reconnection of the bladder to the urethra. Men cannot have children after this procedure.

"But they can be sexually functional with the preservation of the nerve," Desai said.

Staff writer Josh Eiserike can be reached at 703-878-8072 or jeiserike@insidenova.com.