[fr1endly2]

Saw this elsewhere and had to share it here of course im sure this is still a long time away but still amazin!!:

The “Open Wide and Say Ahhh” Department

PIG STUDIES PROVIDE A ROUTE TO INCISIONLESS PROCEDURES

In 1997, when Anthony Kalloo was asked to speak about the future of endoscopy, he had the audacity to tell his fellow gastroenterologists at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy that physicians “someday” would be able to remove a gallbladder without ever making an incision. They had two words for him: “You’re crazy.”
That “someday” is fast approaching. Kalloo and his team of researchers, including Sergey Kantsevoy and Sanjay Jagannath, have successfully taken the first step to incisionless surgery on a pig model, which closely simulates human anatomy, by easing an endoscopy tube through the mouth.
Clearly, GI surgery is making rapid advances. In the last decade, surgeons, for example, have avoided huge abdominal-wall incisions by conducting less-invasive laparoscopic surgery.
Kalloo and his colleagues have worked for five years on the technique they call “the natural orifice approach,” in which a flexible, lighted tube is inserted through the mouth, esophagus and stomach into the peritoneal cavity in the abdomen. It potentially may allow surgeons to remove a gallbladder, take out an appendix, perform gastric bypass operations and conduct exploratory pain examinations by using an endoscope instead of a scalpel.
Initially, Kalloo notes, skeptics contended that this technique would cause stomach contents, such as gastric juice, to leak and cause infections. However, the pig studies have proven these skeptics wrong. Not only is the natural orifice approach technically possible, he says, but it also appears safe. Through survival studies, Kalloo and his colleagues already have been able to successfully conduct gastric bypass surgery—used for the treatment of obesity—and for fallopian tubal ligation. However, Kalloo cautions, “so far we’ve only tested the natural-orifice approach on pigs.” And he concedes that his team still needs to conduct rigorous clinical trials to determine whether their success with animals translates to humans.
“We’re looking forward to the day,” Kalloo says, “when patients will be able to return to work faster, experience less pain and generally recover quicker even than with laparoscopic surgery.”

[DocSanae]

I have been told before that surgeons in India doing a lot of work in this area, but the rest of the world is rather slow in following suit.

[beckamarie]

Thats pretty interesting

[Kat]

Hmmmmm. Remember all those stories about UFO's picking people up and then removing things w/out cutting. I heard these when I was a kid. That's what this story reminds me of.
Isn't it cool to think that some day soon it might be entirely possible???