Hiromi Shinya

Hiromi Shinya (1935 to 2021) was a Japanese-born general surgeon who helped create modern colonoscopy. Born in Yanagawa in Fukuoka Prefecture and a graduate of Juntendo University School of Medicine in 1960, he moved to New York in 1963 for a surgical residency at Beth Israel Medical Center. From 1967 he adapted an Olympus fiberscope to examine the colon, and he favoured a method by which a single endoscopist could carry out the whole examination. With the Olympus employee Hiroshi Ichikawa he designed an electrosurgical snare that could be passed through a colonoscope, and in September 1969 he performed the first colonoscopic electrosurgical snare polypectomy, removing colon polyps without open surgery. A later review called this the most important achievement in gastrointestinal endoscopy. Shinya also wrote popular health books, chiefly in Japanese, and his claims about enzyme supplementation have been criticised as unsupported.