Meet robotic surgeon and Fox News medical correspondent Dr. David Samadi
“If you are good at playing video games, then you will have a great future in this field; but like anything in surgery, repetition makes perfect”
Dr. David Samadi (@DSamadi) is the Chairman of Urology, Chief of Robotic Surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital, and Professor of Urology at Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine. He is trained in open, laparoscopic, and robotic surgery as well as oncology, and he pioneered the Samadi Modified Advanced Robotic Technique (SMART) prostatectomy. Dr. Samadi is a member of the Fox News Medical A-Team, and host of Sunday Housecall on Fox News.
On April 7, @DSamadi answered questions from our community of over a million healthcare professionals. You can read the entire Q&A on Figure 1.
On Robotic Surgery and Being in the Public Eye
In a discussion about robotic versus traditional surgery, Dr. Samadi writes that “when you do hundreds of these cases a year, your eyes will compensate for the lack of tactile feedback. Experience is so important in robotic surgery as well as having a team that knows your moves in the operating room.” In comparison to open surgery, Dr. Samadi believes that robotic surgery results in “less blood loss, better visualization, less pain, better sex life and continence.”
“When you do hundreds of these cases a year, your eyes will compensate for the lack of tactile feedback.”
Answering a question about the dexterity needed for robotic surgery, Dr. Samadi says that it “requires some eye hand coordination, no doubt about it,” but that the outcome depends foremost on the surgeon’s experience and the number of cases he/she has performed. Dr. Samadi feels fortunate to have been educated in open surgery and laparoscopic surgery before moving to robotic surgery: “traditional surgery for prostate cancer is almost obsolete.”
As a physician in the public eye, Dr. Samadi writes that his biggest challenge is to ensure that all the medical information he presents is accurate. He urges that “people need to know that this general medical information is not for everyone; they need to talk to their doctors since every patient has his or her own specific issues. For the longest time, being a doctor on national TV was looked upon as a negative thing; but I still have a very busy practice and I am not a full time doc on TV.”
