Therapeutic Endoscopy

Therapeutic endoscopy is an endoscopic procedure in which treatment, rather than only diagnosis, is carried out through the endoscope, for conditions of the gastrointestinal, respiratory, and urinary tracts such as bleeding, strictures, and polyps. A procedure that starts as a diagnostic look, such as a colonoscopy, often becomes therapeutic on the spot if a polyp or a source of bleeding is found. Established therapeutic techniques include stopping bleeding with adrenaline injection, heater probes, or argon plasma coagulation, injecting sclerotherapy into varices, dilating strictures, removing polyps, banding varices, placing stents, inserting a feeding tube by percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy, and retrieving swallowed foreign objects.