Abdominal surgery isn’t fun. Often minimally invasive “keyhole” surgery is performed, but some patients don’t get off that easy.
For abdominal surgeries involving large incisions, the surgeon decides whether to make a midline (vertical) or transverse (horizontal) incision. When I had a laparotomy (that’s a major abdominal surgery with an incision of around four or five inches), the surgeon recommended a transverse incision because I could “still wear a bikini.” I’ll tell you how that went in a bit. First, a new study compared the two incision types.
The Department of Surgery at Heidelberg University Hospital studied transverse and midline incisions used …read more