Why do doctors go into the operating room with their hands up? Behind the scenes is actually the history of medical asepsis
When we watch a TV show that involves surgery, we often see the same footage of a doctor entering the operating room: a clean gown, mask, hat, and hands held up in front of the chest, entering the operating room in unison, such as this
So the question is, why can't the surgeon's hands be naturally hanging down or in some other position, and why do they have to be in front of the chest?
Before we answer that question (the answer is at the end of the article), let's dig into the vast history of medicine and take the tip of the iceberg and talk about the history of asepsis!
The Age of Terror
Before the 19th century, when anesthesia and asepsis were not commonplace in surgery, it was simply a very scary time. In the case of caesarean sections, for example, since the concept of sterilization and asepsis simply did not exist in the minds of doctors, caesarean sections were literally haunted by mothers, and very few mothers were recorded as having successfully survived.
Birth of the concept of sterilization
In 1865, a young boy was hit by a horse-drawn carriage, and his broken tibia came out of the wound so badly that Joseph Lister, a British surgeon who was the father of sterilization, helped the boy remove the bone. The English surgeon Joseph Lister, the father of antiseptic surgery, helped the boy put the bone back together and then wrapped the wound in a bandage soaked in a solution of linseed oil and carbolic acid (phenol, a disinfectant), making the operation a success. This is how the concept of disinfection and antisepsis really entered medical history. However, in the decades following Lister's introduction of surgical antisepsis, one issue that has been overlooked is that of air purification in the operating room.
The Birth of the Clean Operating Room
It wasn't until the 1930s that people began to realize that the air could be a source of surgical infections.In the 1960s, John Charnley, a British physician and pioneer of total hip replacement, was In the 1960s, John Charnley, a British surgeon who pioneered total hip replacement surgery, first used the world's first ultra-clean ventilation system in order to avoid deep wound infections, turning the operating table into a relatively sterile, clean area, and reducing the rate of postoperative infections from 10% to 0.2%.
In 1966, the world's first laminar flow clean operating room was established at Barton Memorial Hospital in the United States. Clean operating rooms were then built in various countries, and our own clean operating rooms began to appear in the 1980s.
100-level laminar flow operating room, the highest level of cleanliness
According to the degree of air cleanliness, laminar flow clean operating room is also divided into different levels, such as 100, 1000, 10,000, the smaller the number, on behalf of the higher degree of air cleanliness.
100-level laminar flow operating room, the most clean, known as the space laboratory standards , the use of air-cleaning technology to microbial contamination to take a different degree of control, in order to achieve the control of the space environment in the air cleanliness is suitable for all types of surgical requirements; and to provide the appropriate temperature, humidity, to create a fresh, clean, comfortable, low bacterial count of the surgical space!
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100-level laminar flow surgery center of Spruce Yunli Hospital: to create surgical safety and improve the quality of surgery
Based on the customer's point of view, Spruce Yunli Hospital has invested heavily in creating four 100-level laminar flow operating rooms, one of which is a positive and negative pressure operating room, with constant temperature, humidity and pressure, cleanliness, comfort, and sterility, which effectively eliminates airborne contamination of suspended particles on surgical patients. The operating rooms are constant temperature, humidity and pressure, clean, comfortable and sterile, which can effectively eliminate the hazards of airborne contamination on surgical patients, meet the different requirements of various types of surgeries, strictly eliminate surgical infections caused by the surgical environment, maximize the quality of the surgery, so that the customers can effectively reduce the medical infections during the surgery, and have a better and faster recovery after the surgery.
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Finally, let's go back to the question at the beginning of the article: why do doctors have to put their hands on their chests to get into the operating room?
I think at this point you've figured out that it's because of the one-way air flow in the operating room, where the chest is relatively sterile. So in order to maintain sterilized sterility and minimize surgical infections, doctors have to keep their arms in front of their chests. From this detail, we can also see that the operation of the "clean, sterile environment" requirements of how strict.