Up until the 1990s, surgeons cut out your appendix by making an inches-long incision in your stomach that would have taken over a week to heal.

Today, surgeons can remove the pesky organ with three small, strategically made cuts in your abdomen – what’s called laparoscopic surgery. You may get fewer sympathy cards but you're back at work within days, and the scarring is minimal.

Now, imagine this: just one incision, centimeters-long.

How is this possible? By taking diseased organs through the mouth.

Last week, surgeons at UC San Diego apparently performed the country’s first appendix removal via the mouth on a 42-year-old La Jolla man named Jeff Scholz. India is the only other place to have tried this, to their knowledge.

Take a look. (Skip this if watching "House" makes you queasy.)

I asked Dr. Santiago Horgan, professor and director of UC San Diego’s Center for the Future of Surgery, how he and his team of surgeons, co-led by Dr. Mark Talamini, did the procedure.

One incision was made to insert a small camera in the belly button, so surgeons could see the appendix. A tubular probe was moved through the patient’s mouth and into the stomach. Instruments were passed through the tube to make an incision in the stomach wall, so surgeons could get to the appendix for removal.

This is similar to what they used:

“We’ve been training for two years before doing this operation," Horgan said. "We’re trying to establish new territory and seeing if we can minimize pain, post-surgical hernias and improve cosmetic results. And if we can achieve those things, then this will be the standard.”

Horgan said surgeons are trying to make use of “natural orifices” like the mouth, vagina and rectum, so less cutting is necessary.

All well and good. But how did the patient feel afterward?

“A day after surgery, I have little pain, a ‘2’ on a scale of 1 to 10,” Scholz said in a press release from UCSD. “My father had the conventional appendix removal. I didn’t want the standard issue scar on the abdomen.”

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