<P> The manufacturer of the system, Intuitive Surgical, has been criticized for short - cutting FDA approval by a process known as "premarket notification," which claims the product is similar to already - approved products . Intuitive has also been accused of providing inadequate training, and encouraging health care providers to reduce the number of supervised procedures required before a doctor is allowed to use the system without supervision . There have also been claims of patient injuries caused by stray electrical currents released from inappropriate parts of the surgical tips used by the system . Intuitive counters that the same type of stray currents can occur in non-robotic laparoscopic procedures . A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that side effects and blood loss in robotically - performed hysterectomies are no better than those performed by traditional surgery, despite the significantly greater cost of the system . As of 2013, the FDA is investigating problems with the da Vinci robot, including deaths during surgeries that used the device; a number of related lawsuits are also underway . </P> <P> From a social analysis, a disadvantage is the potential for this technology to dissolve the creative freedoms of the surgeon, once hailed by scholar Timothy Lenoir as one of the most professional individual autonomous occupations to exist . Lenoir claims that in the "heroic age of medicine," the surgeon was hailed as a hero for his intuitive knowledge of human anatomy and his well - crafted techniques in repairing vital body systems . Lenoir argues that the da Vinci's 3D console and robotic arms create a mediating form of action called medialization, in which internal knowledge of images and routes within the body become external knowledge mapped into simplistic computer coding . </P>

How much does a da vinci surgery cost