I don't think that robotic telesurgery will every be practical or utilized outside of extreme situations such as those encountered with deep space travel. There are just too many variables and too much else involved in patient care to make this something that will ever be utilized, for example, in the Canadian North (I thought it was laughable that this was a venue that was suggested as one where robotic telesurgery could be widely utilized to help cut down on dollars spent transporting patients South for treatment): I'll link two examples from the article -- the mention of Canada's North and a separate mention of emergency open cardiac surgery in the back of an ambulance -- and address a few of the critical reasons why robotic telesurgery would not be practical for complex cases. People would very wrongly believe that telerobitics could allow for patients in Canada's far North (or anyone anywhere, for that matter) to have access, in their home community to cardiovascular surgical services. Such patients require extremely specialized pre- para- and post-surgical care. Even if the patient could be successfully diagnosed via telemedicine, who is going to provide surgical support, anaesthesia, perfusion, pharmacy, critical care med/nursing, RT/ventilation, etc. There are so many issues -- that is one to thing about. One other, briefly, is the matter of who are the surgeons that will perform these procedures? We have so few surgeons (there is a global shortage) to begin with, and they all have very full and busy practices managing their "live" patients -- who are these surgeons that are going to have time to manage telemedicine/telerobotic patients for something so complex as surgery? Managing a simple check-up via telemedicine is cumbersome enough.