Surgery

By Dipsinh Chavda - Oct 15, 2016

Any bodily injury, be it operative or accidental, is not only associated with local effects, but is also accompanied by a systemic metabolic response. Nutrition, fluid and electrolyte maintenance is a fundamental component of surgery. Patients undergoing surgery are at high risk of malnutrition due to the combination of pre-operative starvation and activation of both the immune system and the neuro-endocrine stress response. Malnourished surgical patients are at increased risk of cardio-respiratory embarrassment, chest and wound infections, prolonged hospitalisation and death. Hence, feeding must be undertaken pre-operatively. Patients awaiting planned surgery should be admitted early to rectify any malnutrition and to make compensatory arrangements for potential fluid and electrolyte imbalance, which might occur during and after operative procedure. Suśruta gave strong recommendations about this in his treatise, theHe advised that no surgical procedure should be performed without first administering a light, liquid diet. The principle still stands today but in other forms of administration.

By M. Bhaskar Rao - Jul 15, 2011

There is a growing general consensus that ancient India had its own fairly developed system of science, mathematics, medicine and even surgery. Still, most textbooks, when they describe the evolutionary history of medicine depict everything other than the modern allopathic system as primitive early explorations. This condescending attitude has done much harm to modern medicine, since it neither tries to understand nor utilise the wide experience and intuitive knowledge of those who have gone before us. This article however throws a fresh insight and compares an ancient surgical technique for treating ano-rectal fistula with present-day surgical options. It is a difficult task and yet the author does it well. It is almost as if Suśruta were present in our own time discussing his methods in a modern medical forum!