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If the thought of undergoing surgery fills you with dread, spare a thought for your forebears.
Feeling tired or being unable to concentrate is common even days after surgery. But there are simple ways to help speed up your recovery.
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Some people can feel drowsy or can’t concentrate days after an operation. While it’s easy to blame the anaesthetics, the real picture is usually more complicated.
Worth doing? Make an informed choice.
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If you’re having a knee or hip replacement this handy tool will be able to tell you about your recovery.
Once you start, you can’t stop.
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By getting young women hooked before they’ve even formed wrinkles, Botox peddlers have realized they can enlist them in a lifetime of treatment.
Australian rates of labiaplasty – sometimes called ‘the Barbie surgery’ – have doubled since 2001.
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Although women like how their genitals look after labial surgery, self esteem and sexual confidence may not improve.
Would you want to be operated on by a surgeon whose only anatomy training was using virtual reality?
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Medical students are using virtual reality to help them learn anatomy. But is it the game changing technology some people say it is?
Weighing up the evidence for surgery is just one thing to consider before going under the knife.
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There’s often limited evidence for many common types of surgery. Understanding what makes good evidence is the key to deciding what’s best for you.
While medical schools have equal numbers of men and women, few female doctors go on to become surgeons.
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The proportion of female surgical trainees is rising, but at a slower rate than other specialties.
How hard can it be? I’ve played Operation dozens of times.
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Medical literature is full of stories of people who have operated on themselves. Surprisingly, some lived to tell the tale.
The surgeon and the robotic arm will work together on a hip replacement.
Stryker
Thousands of hip replacement operations are performed each year, but today is the first time in Australia that a robot will help with the surgery.
Placebo surgery is not used often enough.
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A placebo is an important tool for finding out if a treatment works or not. A dummy pill is one thing, but is it right to perform placebo surgery on someone?
Learning to cope.
Toni Blay
A disease which can mimic the slow march of old age is especially cruel and challenging for those in the prime of life.
Up to 50% of women who have had children will experience vaginal prolapse.
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A common operation to treat vaginal prolapse using an artificially grafted mesh has women needing repeat surgery due to mesh exposure, and suffering from bladder injury and urinary incontinence.
Doctors currently have no perfectly reliable way of ensuring patients are adequately unconscious before an operation begins.
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Measuring certain kinds of brain activity may help doctors track and predict how patients will react to anaesthesia before going under for surgery, our research has found.
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Classical or hip-hop, music often feels like it has healing properties and now scientists have proved it.
Don’t think the surgery worked.
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Science fiction can’t become science fact if neuroscientists are to carry out some daring surgery.
Today’s Da Vinci sticks to surgery rather than the wide interests of its namesake.
Intuitive Surgical
Robotic surgeon assistants are growing in popularity, but aren’t always team players.
Is a person more than their brain?
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The science behind an Italian doctor’s plans to give a man a whole new body might be advanced, but philosophers have been asking what makes a person for centuries.
Day of the tentacle.
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A new robotic tentacle has the potential to revolutionise keyhole surgery.
Doctors’ commercial interests are a powerful disincentive for them to establish licensed facilities with all the checks and balances.
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Cosmetic surgery in Australia is a billion dollar industry that has been allowed to grow with scant regulation.