the.com/gastroscopy
A camera on a cable touring your stomach so a doctor doesn't have to guess.
means A medical procedure in which a thin, flexible tube with a camera is passed down the throat to examine the inside of the esophagus, stomach, and upper small intestine.
from Built from Greek parts: 'gaster' meaning stomach or belly, and 'skopein' meaning to look at or examine — the same 'skopein' that gives us telescope and microscope. Put together, it's simply 'stomach-looking,' a 19th/20th-century medical coinage from an era when doctors were busy naming every new instrument after exactly what it let them see.
- scope length
- about 90 cm, roughly a golf club
- sedation
- often just numbing spray, you stay awake
- duration
- usually under 10 minutes start to finish
- first use
- rigid versions existed since the 1860s