RESPIRATORY RESEARCH FOUNDATION OF INDIA

The fact that you are reading this page means that someone known to you might be suffering from a respiratory ailment for which your doctor might have advised surgery. Its always difficult news when surgery is suggested as a means of treatment. There are always lot of concerns about any kind of surgery and more so if it is a surgery on the chest. There are a lot of questions which come to your mind. How will you do the surgery? How will it affect my lifestyle and daily activities? What impact will it cause on my family? Will I be able to withstand the surgery? What are the complications? What is the cost of the procedure involved? Most of these concerns are real and thats a hard truth. The good news amongst all this is that surgery can sometimes effectively cure your disease. However the treatment can generate as much as anxiety if not more than the disease itself. Having encountered many patients like yourself we understand your concerns and help in providing proper information to go about your treatment

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What is thoracic surgery?

It simply means operating inside the chest. Most of the lung diseases like asthma, COPD, pulmonary tuberculosis etc can be managed effectively by medicines. However there are still some diseases which require surgery to be performed for its resolution.

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Some of them are

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• Lung cancer – In its early stages lung cancer is very much treatable by surgery and must be offered to those patients who are fit.

• Pneumothorax – Air within the pleural cavity. Sometimes air accumulates within the pleural cavity due to rupture of a bleb or a bulla in your lung. This might lead to collapse of the lung and difficulty in breathing. Surgery might be required to remove the blebs or bullae and prevent recurrence of the condition.

• Empyema – Pleural space infection – This is one of the commonest conditions requiring surgery in our country. It can occur as a complication of tuberculosis or other lung infections. Usually surgery is required for adequate drainage of the fluid and lung to expand properly.

• Tumours in the chest – Most of the chest tumours are amenable to resection and surgery offers a good chance of removing the entire tumour.

• Undiagnosed thoracic disease – Sometimes when a diagnosis cant be arrived at by other means, we may have to resort to surgery to establish the diagnosis.

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This list is neither complete nor exhaustive and there are a variety of other conditions in which surgery might be useful. Thoracic surgery is an advanced type of surgery and is performed by specialists who have been trained in this field.

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Thoracic surgery may be done by open method or by VATS (Video Assisted Thoracoscopic Surgery). VATS is a recent advancement of