Impacts of the Issue
Re-operation is very common, and it is a problematic procedure with far-reaching impacts.
Ethical and Health Impacts
Reoperation has numerous ethical and health impacts. For one, reoperation is accompanied by increased risk of excessive bleeding, blood clots, or infections in other parts of the body, which can be extremely dangerous. In addition, the British Medical Journal has found that reoperation is associated with increased mortality rates by 27-28%. In other words, reoperation exposes the patient to a potentially dangerous surgical procedure a second time, which calls the ethics of reoperation into question.
Environmental Impacts
Reoperation requires a second surgical procedure. This encourages unnecessary resource consumption - the more often surgery is performed, the more often equipment must be replaced and the more often new tools must be bought, and therefore manufactured. In addition, to undergo reoperation, a patient must be re-admitted, housed, fed, and transported, which further consumes resources. This excess resource consumption is quite detrimental; it can contribute to waste and pollution, which is extremely harmful to the environment.
Social Impacts
Reoperation means that a patient must go under the knife again. Any surgery poses the risk of potential injury and death, and reoperation increases anxiety and inflicts emotional trauma on a patient and their family. Additionally, in the case of reoperation for cancer surgery, a second surgery delays systemic treatments such as chemotherapy and immunotherapy that ensure after surgery. This delay may cost a patient their life or severely deteriorate their health. In this case, the blame is usually put on doctors and hospitals who can potentially get involved in lawsuits. Thus, reoperation has impacts that reach beyond just the patient, affecting their families, loved ones, doctors, and hospital administrations.
Financial Impacts
The average American yearly salary is approximately $36,000. A reoperation costs, on average, $150,000. This is a monumental sum that is nearly 5 times the American's average salary. Thus, a second surgery is often too much of a financial burden on patients, endangering their financial security. This commonly leads to additional emotional and psychological stress as well.
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Though reoperation is a problematic procedure with many negative effects, if it does not occur, there can be serious issues. Sometimes, the post-operative biopsy test results can indicate no cancer in surrounding tissue even though there actually is. In this case, cancer has gone undetected, and re-operation is not done, allowing this cancer to grow more serious and spread throughout the body. This known as a "false negative," and it can lead to the cancer advancing to more serious stages. ​
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Risks of Not Re-operating
57%
Percent of accurate biopsies: This means that cancer is accurately detected, or no cancer is left.
43%
Percent of inaccurate biopsies:
This means that either the cancer is left undetected, allowing it to advance to more serious stages OR that there is a false positive.
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These statistics indicate that a substantial number of post-operative biopsies are actually inaccurate. Thus, the existing cancer cells are left untreated and are allowed to advance to more severe stages of cancer. This issue, along with the environmental, economic, social, and ethical impacts of reoperation, indicates the magnitude of the issue, and the need for a solution that would mitigate these impacts and adverse results.
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