Watch Aunt Maude's Hernia Operation

Tampa General is joining an increasing number of hospitals showing surgeries on the internet.

"It's kind of cool, actually, watching it live," said Jean Mayer, Tampa General's vice president for strategic services. "As people use the Internet more and more to find health information, it appears to be a trend."

St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa webcast its first surgery last fall. It webcast a second in February, and plans more, all of the same heart procedure.

Hospitals from Massachusetts General to the Cleveland Clinic are getting in the act. The number of surgeries webcast by the company that will show Tampa General's surgery has soared the past several years, said Ross Joel, executive vice president of sales and marketing for slp3D Inc. of Connecticut.

In 1998, when slp3D first started focusing on Internet surgeries, the company did about 20, Joel said. This year, the number is close to 200.

For Norman, the surgery is an opportunity to spread knowledge. He specializes in a minimally invasive surgery to remove an enlarged parathyroid gland. The operation takes about 15 minutes, and patients leave an hour later.

Link.

All information, all the time. Do we need to know what surgery looks like? Could such knowledge have bad effects? Will certain surgeries be prohibited from on-line viewing? Do all patients undergoing surgery have sufficient capacity to consent to the invasion of privacy? Will poor patients consent to broadcasting of their surgery in order to help pay the costs? Closely-related: Will hospitals require poor patients to consent to broadcasting as a condition of doing the surgery free?

Just a few questions we might want to ask. We get so caught up in all the new avenues of information, we never ask whether all the avenues end up getting us even more lost.