The Urology Team
This is from the feature story from WeAreAustin on KEYE TV.
Dr. Richard Chopp:
The Urology Team started actually in about 1952 in Austin. Our founder was a gentleman by the name of Clare Bates. And since then, Urology Team has evolved into a, actually a multi-specialty urology group, and I by that I mean each of the members does general urology but specializes, for instance, I do a lot of the prostate cancer work, as does Dr. Fagin.
Dr. Randy Fagin: daVinci Robotic prostate surgery is the removal of the prostate using a microscope, essentially, and small microscopic tools. So by shrinking the tools and giving us a more precise view were able to do the entire operation inside the patients body, that reduces blood loss, quickens recovery, reduces life stay, and gets patients back to their lives quicker than ever.
Dr. Richard Chopp: HIFU, if you think about the prostate like a lime, it has a green capsule on the outside and it has meat on the inside. And the meat on the inside is where the prostate cancer grows, and what we do with this focal point, by moving the probe around, is we sequentially eat all the little areas on the inside of the lime, leaving the capsule, and so there by killing all the tissue on the inside which subsequently gets schlepped off. And the reason that it seems to be so popular and well tolerated is that all the nerves and all the arteries that are responsible for potency are preserved and also the muscles that are responsible for continence are also not injured.
Dr. Stephen Hardeman: Here at the Urology Team, we deal with a variety of illnesses and particular, the patients that I have been interested in, have been the kidney transplant donors, and also men who have problems with enlarged prostates. Prostate cancer is the primary reason why men should be concerned about prostate health. It is potentially life threatening. And then second of that would be enlargement of the prostate, or what we call enlargement of the prostate where theres problems with obstruction.
Dr. Bryan Kansas: Male incontinence can result from a lot of things. The most common thing that I see is from post-prostatectomy after someone has had a radical prostatectomy. Theres a lot of different treatment options for male incontinence, from a surgical perspective. There are injectable agents that can be put into the urethra to basically create a speed bump into the urethra, slow things down, there are different types of slings that can be put in, and there are also an artificial urinary sphincter, which I do a good number of.
Dr. Lester Wang: Extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy has revolutionized kidney surgery because in the old days, you used to wait until the stone was really big and the old urologists used to come, their ripe enough to take out, and they used to make huge incisions in people to take out the kidney stone. Nowadays with modern technique we can smash it with water waves, breaking up the smaller stone fragments. Another way is we can put in scopes from above and below without having to make any big incisions to remove them, and so open kidney stone surgery is almost never heard of today.
Dr. Eric Giesler: You know whether its from the common procedure of a circumcision to complex kidney stones, we see a diverse array of patients in our offices with multiple urological issues. Kidney stones is one of the more prevalent problems that we see, were able to address those with minimally invasive techniques, allowing patients to go home the same day, return to work usually within one to three days, and to minimize post-operative discomfort and to allow them the fullest recovery possible.