Outpatient Surgery Magazine - Subscribers

Sleep Apnea - Outpatient Surgery Magazine - October 2018

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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step if far cheaper than the $75,000 or so it would cost to treat an infection. Irrigation is also quick. Generally speaking, all it takes is 5 minutes at the end of surgery to do a proper wound irrigation. And sometimes it takes as little as 2 minutes. One exception being when you're doing an abdominal surgery on a morbidly obese patient. Here, you could be dealing with a subcutaneous layer that's anywhere from 5 to 10 inches thick. After closing up the fascia, and gently massaging the subcuta- neous layer with your fingers while you irrigate, you need to work until all the fat globules come out of the wound. And you wouldn't believe how much devitalized fat comes out in these cases. As intensive as this can be, it's well worthwhile to irrigate. Of the 600 open vertical banded gastroplasties my partner and I performed using vigorous irrigation of the subcutaneous tissue to remove fat globules, we haven't had a single major wound infection. You can't argue with those results. OSM 7 8 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • O C T O B E R 2 0 1 8 Dr. Biesecker (vivngar@aol.com) is a retired surgeon who specialized in general surgery at High Point (N.C.) Regional Hospital.

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