Page 25 - NEWSLETTER_23

ΣΥΝΈΝΤΈΥΞΗ
Tεύχος 23 | Μάϊος-Ιούνιος 2023
Η ακόλουθη συνέντευξη πραγματοποιήθηκε μέσω Zoom στις 19/5/23. Απομαγνητοφώνηση & επιμέλεια κειμένου: Θεόδωρος Σπίνος, Φίλιππος Νικητάκης, ειδικευόμενοι Γ/Χ
Filippos Nikitakis (F.N.): How did you decide to become a urologist?
Peter Wiklund (P.W.): Like most things in life, it was most by chance, basically. At Sweden at the time, after finishing med school, you were supposed to do an internship, which was almost two years. Before I started my internship, I started basic research. So, I did a PhD which was a 3-year full-time research. And then I decided that I wanted to become a surgeon. But I didn’t really think about what type of surgeon. And then one evening, the Professor of Urology in Karolinska called me at home and he asked me if I would like to work at the Urology Department. At that time, I didn’t know so much about Urology. I just knew that they did surgeries, basically. And then I said “yes, why not”, “I can try it”, because it was difficult to get a job at that time. But once I started, I realized that it was a very good specialty. It had a lot of interesting surgical procedures, from really big oncological surgeries, like cystectomies, to smaller endoscopic procedures like TURPs. And I also liked that it was a specialty with many aspects, from endocrinology with hormones to tumor biology and advanced research. You can go everywhere in Urology.
F.N.: What other specialties had you considered following, when you were in medical school?
P.W.: Basically, my only focus was to follow a specialty that it had to do with surgery. And I think that for every medical student, the most important decision to make is whether you want to go into a surgical specialty or whether you want to go more into a medicine specialty. I would probably be happy if I had followed some other surgical specialty. But Urology is a really good specialty.
F.N.: Could you please describe us your feelings on the first surgery that you had attended?
P.W.: Before I started medical school, I went into a University Hospital in Sweden and I saw an aortic abdominal aneurysm operation. It is a very strange feeling when you go to a hospital for the first time. You enter the OR, you dress up in the green scrubs and someone takes a big knife and opens the abdomen. But I think I fell in love with the atmosphere, because there is a special atmosphere in the OR. Some people hate it and some people like it. And I think it’s more a personality thing whether you like it or not. That experience was important for me in order to choose surgery.
Theodoros Spinos (T.S.): Reading your CV, we found out that except from urology you have followed an academic path on physiology. Is that right?
P.W.: Yes exactly. My PhD was in physiology. T.S.: Was your love for physiology useful for
your latter success in urology?
P.W.: Yes. For me, that was almost everything in my career. I think I learned everything from physiology. It teaches you a way to think about things. It doesn’t tell you how to operate of course, but it tells you how to think when you operate. Also, I did a lot of surgeries on animals. You had to be very careful as a surgeon in physiology. I did a lot of research on nerve transmission. So, I had to learn how to be very gentle with the tissues. If I pulled too much on something, the experiment was a failure. That's how I learned how to use tissues without destroying them. I think that was something helpful. But the most important thing physiology gave me was the mindset.
T.S.: When you first heard about the robotic system, could you imagine its adoption from urologists?
P.W.: Actually yes! When I started robotic surgery, it was very long time ago. It must be before almost anyone else in the whole word. There were very very few people that were working with the robot in Urology. At that time everyone was talking about laparoscopic surgery. My training was completely in open surgery, so I did only open procedures. Then I started a little bit the laparoscopic and I thought “Wow it took like 9 hours to do a prostate, I don’t like this”. Because you could see that the patients after surgery were doing better. It is very difficult to show that scientifically. But you just have to see this every time you visit the patient. It is different from what do we usually see. The first time I saw a robot was in an EAU meeting in Geneva. I sat down in the robot and I started working, doing sutures and other things like that and immediately, after like 2 minutes, I could do things that I could not do laparoscopically. So, I said “Wow! For me this has to be the future!”. But at that time, like nowadays, now still, the robot was very expensive. It was difficult to go back to my hospital and tell them that we had to buy a robot for 2 million euros. But when I came home back in
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