suck up the smoke. It's not that
way anymore. Quiet evacuators
are built right into the pencil.
"Oftentimes, if you get the
opportunity to hear out the sur-
geons and you put a good, rele-
vant pencil in their hand that they
can use, they'll tell you, 'That's not
so bad,'" says Mr. Palmerton.
But getting a surgeon-champion
is not as easy as it sounds.
"Surgeons tell me that they've been doing this for 30 years and the
smoke hasn't killed them yet," says Mr. Palmerton.
His response to that? He makes sure the surgeons understand that
there are other people in the OR — nurses, techs — some young,
some perhaps who may be pregnant, that are also being affected by
the smoke.
"Surgeons will say, 'You know, that's a good point.' The surgeon is
just one person, and it's not really fair that one person gets to not care
while everybody else is at risk," says Mr. Palmerton.
Through that continued awareness, though, there is less and less
resistance to smoke evacuation protocol. Although the dangers of sur-
gical smoke have been investigated for decades, Mr. Palmerton says
the lack of solid research about it feeds into surgeon resistance.
"That type of research would be difficult to do, but how much do
you really need to understand that breathing ablated human tissue
that is shown to be carcinogenic, with neurotoxins and that is viral, is
bad?" he says. "It gets to the point of common sense. If somebody was
standing in the OR smoking a cigarette in the corner, you wouldn't
accept it."
OSM
J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 9 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y. N E T • 8 9
• SECONDHAND SMOKE It's not enough to have smoke
evacuators in place. They've got to be in use — regardless of
surgeon preference.
