9 Disgusting Medical Treatments That Might Just Save Your Life

4. Natural Orifice Surgery

Something that some people worry about when getting surgery, is how bad the scarring will be. They can be disfiguring, painful or even an unwelcome reminder of trauma, but what's the alternative?

Well, some bright spark figured that, hey, the human body already has a lot of holes in it, we could just remove major organs through those instead.

Natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery (NOTES) involves sticking an endoscope, tools and all, into the body via a natural orifice such as the mouth, anus or vagina, and accessing the surgery site through an internal incision. The affected tissue or organs are then removed through the chosen orifice, leaving no external scarring.

The technique is still firmly in the research stage and, obviously, wouldn't work for everything (it's difficult, for example, to pin a broken ankle via the colon), but it could be used in future abdominal surgery. Which would you rather?