Back Surgery: Preventing Infections - Health Channel

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Back Surgery: Preventing Infections |

Back Surgery: Preventing Infections, Health Channel

Spine surgeons instead of exposing the skin during surgery, they cover the skin with IO-band for avoiding infections. Dr. Georgiy Brusovanik, Spine Surgeon with Baptist Health South Florida, describes how he performs the procedure.

Transcript

Back Surgery: Preventing Infections, Health Channel

So you mentioned that the techniques that you use allow for less infections sure briefly I know we’ll get into it more but what are some of those techniques that you use that allows a patient maybe to walk away without the fear of an infection all right so um it’s a few things for example I like to clean the skin of my patients myself back in the day we used to say to patients to go home and scrub their skin with the chlorhexidine brush and then they would put on their regular clothes and what would be the point of scrubbing it with a sterilizing brush so we have this high standards for cleaning our own skin surgeons but then when it comes to patients the standards are I think I kind of low you know you can just use this betadine paint and you paint the scheme abated then and that’s supposedly good enough so I’ll instead of just using betadine I’ll use a betadine scrub on the skin then it was alcohol there’s a different kind of betadine then more alcohol and then I also use chlorhexidine I mean I know it’s three times the wash of safe road look it’s a little OCD but what’s the downside the downside of washing to much is nothing but the upside is potentially avoiding an infection absolutely instead of exposing the skin during surgery we cover the skin with this thing called an ayah ban it’s like this big it’s like a saran wrap okay this way once you make the incision the only thing that’s exposed are the edges of the skin right at the incision site so let’s say you have this big field and you have a bacteria sitting and waiting to get picked up and send into the wound it was a big sticker that goes on top of that that will limit that chance antibiotics that’s a big deal right so historically and for many years now the orthopedic community has been giving patients ancef which is a cephalosporin a type of antibiotic that’s good for Staphylococcus and streptococcus which are the most common causes of infection you

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