Abuja – Dr Celsius Undie, a Consultant Urological surgeon, has said that the technology that can remove cancer tumours without cutting open a patient, is available in Nigeria .

Undie, who disclosed this  in Abuja on Monday, decried a situation where Nigerians spent huge sums going abroad for surgery.

He explained that in the past three years, Kelina Hospital, Abuja, had hosted a team of international surgeons who were in Nigeria to perform surgeries for free and to teach Nigerian surgeons.

The urologist said that the Surgical Aid Foundation (SAF), an NGO, and other stakeholders help subsidize the cost of these surgeries for patients.

“We invited a team from the Société Internationale d’Urologie (SIU) and the president himself will be coming to work with our Nigerian surgeons in a week long endeavour in March.”

Undie stated that they would not be carrying out any surgeries outside the field of urology because of the type of equipment available and the specialty of the visiting surgeons.

“The people who are coming are also urological surgeon and we will do minimal access surgeries with urological equipment from this hospital.”

“We are going to do only minimal access surgery; there is no point in doing open surgery. Open surgery means cutting the body open, which is what everybody is doing in the country now.

“we have acquired a lot of equipment which some other hospitals do not have and we want to show people that we can do these surgeries.

“They don’t need to travel to Europe or North America or India to get these surgeries done; they can have them done in the country.

“We are bringing a team that has been doing these surgeries for a very long time, to expose ourselves so they can see what we are doing and see if we are doing it the way it supposed to be done, so that we don’t begin to think that we know everything.”

Undies stated that one of the reasons for not carrying out open surgery was to prove to Nigerians that they did not need to travel abroad to get such services.

He said that the time and money sick people wasted on getting visas and traveling abroad should go into improving the Nigerian health industry instead.

He said that endoscopic and laparoscopic surgical services, now available in the country, were not adequately covered by the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).

Undie explained that as a result, such surgeries had remained expensive for people who did not qualify for the surgical outreach.

According to him, the cost can be compared to the amount of time and money that goes into traveling abroad for treatment or time wasted recovering from open surgery.

“What we mean by there’ll be no open surgery is that all the surgeries will be done endoscopically, laparoscopically. They will not cut the body open; we go through natural orifices in the body to get surgeries done inside the body, without cutting the body open.

“That is minimal access surgery; we are following the tract, where the urine passes to come out of the body to go into the prostate and remove it without a wound outside.

“We can go into the bladder and remove cancer from the bladder without any external wound; we can go into the urethra – urethra is a small tube that joins the kidney to the bladder and there may be stones there.

“We could use lasers or some other technology to break up the stones without cutting the body open. We could do all these surgeries without cutting open the body and the next day the patient is gone.”

Undie said that with such services, patients could be sure of speedier recovery.

He added that Kelina Hospital might consider doing another batch of surgeries later in the year depending on the outcome of the surgeries in March. (NAN)