I like this story about robotic prostate surgery for what it represents. It is a nice allegory for many things in modern medicine: increasing costs, technology fetish, direct-to-consumer marketing, economic incentives that lead to conflicts of interest. Urologists have a fancy new technology to remove prostate cancer, a robot.
Surgeons trained to use this thing and hospitals that purchase it have a big incentive to do robotic-assisted surgeries: they pay more than conventional techniques and the machines cost a whole lot of money.
Patients don't know any better, but hear about the fancy machine and assume it is better. They read stuff on the internet, or even advertising from the (sole) manufacturer of the robots. They want the robot.
But there is no quality data proving that surgery with the robot is better than conventional surgery. It may be, but who knows? For now everyone is rushing for what looks like snake oil.
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