| Magnesium and Heart Surgery |
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When magnesium levels are corrected by the administration of magnesium before, during and after surgery medical complications are significantly reduced to the point where it becomes simply imprudent to perform surgery without it. Dr. Minato at the Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, in Japan, strongly recommends the correction of hypomagnesemia during and after off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting (OPCAB) for the prevention of perioperative coronary artery spasm and his team has actually said that they won’t perform this surgery without its use any longer. In a 1995 study, researchers found that the in-hospital death rate of those receiving IV magnesium was one-fourth that of those who received standard treatment alone. It is simply amazing how easy it is to make surgery safer. Not only does the use of magnesium make sense but so does scrawling on the patient with a permanent marker to show where the surgeon should cut. It also makes sense to ask a person's name to make sure the surgical team has the right patient. Counting sponges to make sure you didn't leave any inside the body is also a good idea. Doctors worldwide who followed a checklist of steps like these cut the death rate from surgery almost in half and complications by more than a third according to a large international study of how to avoid blatant operating room mistakes. The following checklist was developed by the World Health Organization and includes measures such as:
Before the checklist was introduced, 1.5 percent of patients in a comparison group died within 30 days of surgery at the eight hospitals. Afterward, the rate dropped to 0.8 percent - a 47 percent decrease. In the study major complications dropped from 11 percent to 7 percent.
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