The Department of General and Abdominal Surgery, Colorectal Surgery, Hepatopancreatobiliary Surgery, Hernia Surgery, Endocrine Surgery, Vascular Surgery and Bariatric Surgery at the Hospital Cologne-Holweide provides the full range of medical services in the areas of its specialization. The team of the department's surgeons performs operations of varying complexity for liver, pancreatic, gallbladder, bile duct, rectal, colon, anal, thyroid, parathyroid, and adrenal diseases. Of particular interest is surgery for stomach, colon, liver, esophageal, pancreatic, and thyroid cancer. The specialists at the medical center also perform surgery for treating vascular diseases, including occlusive peripheral arterial disease, carotid stenosis, abdominal and thoracic aortic aneurysms, traumatic vascular injuries, etc. The department successfully performs hernioplasty for inguinal hernias, umbilical hernias, and anterior abdominal wall hernias. Patients with morbid obesity can get medical care here and are offered all surgical treatment options available in modern medicine, including gastric banding, gastric bypass, sleeve gastroplasty, intragastric balloon placement, and biliopancreatic diversion with duodenal switch. Almost all surgical interventions are performed using minimally invasive techniques. The department's operating rooms are equipped with state-of-the-art technology and meet European hygiene and safety standards. The Head Physician of the department is Prof. Dr. med. Claus Eisenberger.
The department's abdominal surgeons often treat patients with colon, stomach, pancreatic, and esophageal cancers. Stomach cancer is a common condition that is most often caused by a Helicobacter pylori infection. Stomach malignancies do not cause any symptoms for a long time, but they grow and metastasize quite quickly. A surgical intervention is the main and most effective treatment method. In the early stages, surgeons can preserve the stomach or even perform minimally invasive endoscopic intervention. In most cases, patients also receive neoadjuvant chemotherapy before surgery, which shrinks the size of the tumor and destroys micrometastases, thereby reducing the scope of the upcoming intervention and making it as effective as possible. Patients with advanced stomach cancer quite often have local metastases, so total cytoreduction with follow-up hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) is additionally performed during the operation. An optimal treatment regimen for the patient is developed during an interdisciplinary tumor board when doctors from related medical specialties cooperatively study the results of diagnostic tests and prescribe a complex of therapeutic measures that will provide the patient with the best results.
General and abdominal surgeons successfully perform surgery for benign gastrointestinal diseases like gastroesophageal reflux disease, achalasia cardia, Zenker's diverticulum, gastritis, gastric ulcers, benign neoplasms, and other pathologies. The first-line treatment involves drug therapy or endoscopic therapy. If these methods do not give the desired result, surgeons are involved in the therapeutic process. As a rule, surgery for benign diseases of the digestive system is performed using minimally traumatic surgical techniques.
An important focus of the department's work is on colorectal surgery. The specialists in this field provide medical care to patients with rectal, bowel, and anal pathologies, among which the most common are anal cancer, hemorrhoids, anal eczema, anal fissures, sphincter dysfunction, rectal prolapse, rectal prolapse, rectocele, and anal abscesses. The department's doctors have in their arsenal such methods as proctoscopy, rectoscopy, anorectal manometry, rectal endosonography, MRI defecography, biopsy, and other diagnostic methods to make a diagnosis. The range of surgical interventions for proctologic diseases includes the Longo procedure, the STARR procedure, sphincter reconstruction, rectopexy, sacral neuromodulation, pilonidal cyst excision and its reconstruction using the Karydakis technique, and many other procedures. Minimally invasive techniques are used during the treatment, so patients can return to their everyday lives as soon as possible.
The department's team of endocrine surgeons has vast experience in the treatment of thyroid diseases. Of particular interest is the treatment of thyroid cancer: papillary, follicular, medullary, and anaplastic. During the diagnostics, doctors conduct thyroid palpation, ultrasound scanning, laboratory tests, a biopsy, and scintigraphy. The course of treatment is planned based on the diagnostic results as well as the patient's age and their general health condition. The main treatment method is tumor resection or total removal of the thyroid gland: hemithyroidectomy or total thyroidectomy. The operations are performed using minimally invasive techniques under the guidance of a modern neuromonitoring system to prevent any damage to the recurrent laryngeal nerve. Radioactive iodine therapy and hormone therapy are often used as supplements to surgery.
The department's surgical options include:
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Photo of the doctor: (c) Krankenhaus Köln-Holweide
