David Seo서형석

Reporter

Medical Insights Korea

David Seo reports on operative surgery in South Korea for Medical Insights Korea, covering surgical technique, operative practice, and the outcome evidence behind it.

Covers: Operative surgery · Surgical technique · Surgical outcomes · Gallbladder · Thyroid · Surgical safety · Cholecystectomy · Critical view of safety
Record: 6 written
Contact: gudtjr345@gmail.com

Written by David Seo

News · Thyroid

A thousand consecutive Korean robotic thyroidectomies report four times the nerve injury that pooled data gives the approach. The difference is who looked

Meta-analysis puts transient nerve injury after transaxillary surgery at 1 percent. A Korean series that laryngoscoped every patient found 4.1 percent — in a cohort whose average patient was 41 years old with an 11 mm tumour.

David Seo2 Sept 20266 min read

News · Thyroid

Pooled data on 304,352 thyroid operations puts nerve injury between 1 and 10 percent. The lowest figure belongs to the approach with the most selected patients

Overdiagnosis only matters because treatment costs something. Two 2026 meta-analyses quantify what it costs — and both contain numbers that will be misread if the intervals around them are dropped.

David Seo2 Sept 20266 min read

News · Gallbladder

Two meta-analyses published weeks apart disagree about whether robotic gallbladder surgery injures more bile ducts. Read the confidence intervals

One pooled 1.77 million patients and found no difference. The other pooled 412,000 and found triple the risk. They are less contradictory than they look, and neither settles the question.

David Seo1 Sept 20266 min read

News · Gallbladder

Surgeons stopped escaping difficult gallbladders by opening the abdomen. What they do instead is safer for the bile duct and harder on everything else

A society review of subtotal cholecystectomy puts bile duct injury at 0.3 percent and overall complications at 24.7 percent. That trade needs stating whenever a low conversion rate is offered as proof of surgical quality.

David Seo1 Sept 20266 min read

News · Gallbladder

Korea now has its own number for the worst thing that can go wrong in gallbladder surgery: 0.7 percent

A prospective study across 18 Korean academic hospitals put surgery-related complications at 2.5 percent and bile duct injury at 0.7 percent. Seventeen injuries in 2,514 operations is a small foundation for the risk calculator built on it.

David Seo1 Sept 20266 min read

News · Gallbladder

Draining the gallbladder before surgery added a week in hospital and doubled ICU admission. It did not reduce complications

Two propensity-matched Korean series of moderate-to-severe acute cholecystitis found no complication benefit from drainage before laparoscopic cholecystectomy. The delay that predicted harm was the patient's, not the surgeon's.

David Seo1 Sept 20266 min read