Natural Orifices Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES), an innovation in minimally invasive surgery that involves using the body’s natural orifices—the mouth, vagina, and rectum—as the entry point for the operation, is being performed successfully at the Hadassah Medical Center.
The surgery requires just one small incision—about 2 to 5 millimeters in length—in the belly button to enable the surgeon to insert a camera and decide how to enter the abdomen safely. Recovery is almost immediate, in contrast to recovery time with more traditional laparoscopic surgery, which is 7 to 10 days.
Dr. Yoav Mintz of Hadassah’s Department of Surgery introduced the procedure at our Medical Center after learning the technique while on sabbatical at the University of California-San Diego. One of the first people he and his special team of doctors and nurses have operated on was a woman with gallstones. “Everything went well,” Dr. Mintz reports, “and she was back at work three days later.”
