Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Definition
By Mayo Clinic staffCystoscopy is a procedure used to see inside your bladder and urethra — the tube that carries urine from your bladder to the outside of your body. During a cystoscopy (sis-TOS-ko-pe) procedure, your doctor uses a hollow scope (cystoscope) equipped with a lens to carefully examine the lining of your bladder and your urethra. The cystoscope is inserted into your urethra and slowly advanced into your bladder.
Cystoscopy, also called cystourethroscopy, may be performed as an outpatient procedure using a local anesthetic to numb your urethra. Or cystoscopy can be performed in the hospital using regional or general anesthesia. The type of cystoscopy you undergo depends on the reason for your procedure.
