The sound of the words ‘heart surgery’ packs a punch during a routine checkup with your doctor. The fact of the matter is, many are hearing those words more often now that doctors are becoming more and more adept at catching heart disease years before it becomes serious. Along with extremely early diagnosis, procedures in heart surgery have been streamlined and modernized to effectively boost effectiveness and decrease recovery time. Dubbed ‘minimally invasive heart surgery,’ patients can literally have heart surgery and be back to their normal activities within a few weeks. These leaps and bounds that have been made are being shared with the medical community and yielding incredible results in the lives of those who have had this type of procedure performed.

The difference between traditional heart surgery and the ‘minimally invasive’ kind is simply the need to open the chest completely. In traditional heart surgery, the breastbone is cracked in order to spread the ribcage wide enough for doctors to reach inside and work on the heart. Minimally invasive heart surgery involves only making small incisions in the chest where instruments and small cameras can be inserted. Surgeons are trained to perform these procedures through TV images from the cameras inside of the chest.

In recent years, researches have observed that most people with heart disease are usually struggling with the failure or malfunction of only a small part of the heart. In most cases, being able to fix one small part is sufficient to return back to full health. Minimally invasive heart surgery makes it possible to fix the valves that are causing problems with disrupting the entire chest cavity in the process. Exposing the internal organs increases the risk, especially for the elderly, for infection. Small children and the elderly do much better with minimally invasive approaches.