High Intensity Health with Mike Mutzel, MS

Dr. Alverdy performs a wide variety of complex minimally invasive and open gastrointestinal surgical procedures with 25 years of experience in the field. He is nationally recognized for introducing several new operations into the field, including minimally invasive pancreatic surgery, bariatric surgery, and surgery for disorders of the foregut including the esophagus and stomach.

Here are some highlights: 

1:37  Understanding Post-Surgical Infections and Gut Bacteria: Dr. Alverdy is a gastrointestinal surgeon.  He also has an NIH-funded laboratory that studies how gut bacteria complicates recovery from surgery.  Every patient’s fear is that they will develop an infection after an operation.  Infection is especially problematic when prosthetic material is placed in the body.  Dr. Alverdy has been working for 20 years to apply the latest molecular techniques to understand problems that most doctors tend to blame on mechanical issues.  

4:06 Healing from Surgery and Gut Flora:  When you are a surgical patient, you have your procedure, you go home, and you start eating your regular food.  You have generally had one shot of antibiotics, which assaults your gut microbiome, but you can rebuild your gut flora quickly at home by resuming your regular diet.  There are about 80,000 elective operations done every day and most of us heal quickly at home.  

5:00 Longer Hospital Recovery and Gut Biodiversity:  Sometimes we have a prolonged recovery, for example after, a car accident, a liver transplant, or burn injuries.  In the intensive care unit, even when there is no identified source of infection, doctors will put 80% of us on antibiotics unnecessarily.   

 

6:37 The Consequences of Unnecessary Antibiotics in Prolonged Recovery:  It is called ecological collapse of the normal gut biome.  Your normal health-promoting microbiome is replaced with a pathobiome.  Harmful, pathogenic, bacteria become predominant in your gut.  This dysbiosis can directly impair the immune system and directly and adversely affect the outcome.  Instead of being better in a day or two, it may take you 2 weeks to recover.  

Direct download: HIH_111_John_Alverdy.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:48pm PDT

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