Performance Apparel

Our HOI Blog readers send us excellent questions with regard to surgeries, recovery, emerging trends in medicine and so on, and once in a while they ask us about us! Recently one of our readers asked how surgeons and their teams keep up their strength and focus during a long and physically grueling surgical procedure.

Our surgeons and their teams confess that some procedures require the physical strength of a laborer as well as the capacity to deal with postural strain on the back and neck and fatigue of the mind. Some of our surgeons cope with the physicality of surgery by being athletes themselves or at the least exercisers. Although they confess being physically fit does not eliminate the strain and fatigue, it does help.

Recently, one of our HOI surgeons, Dr. Carlos A. Prietto, revealed a unique and possibly trending technique for helping surgeons and their surgical teams with physical strain in an interview with Greg Hardesty of the Orange County Register. Dr. Prietto, along with other surgeons, has taken to wearing "performance apparel".

If you've never heard of performance apparel, neither had many of us! Performance apparel is aimed at improving posture in the wearer. It hugs the torso somewhat like an apparel version of sports tape, containing special panels that grasp muscles critical to good posture and pulling the body into alignment so that the shoulders and spine are properly positioned.

Apparently, athletes have been wearing compression clothing to improve performance for some time, but surgeons and surgical teams are fairly new to the phenomenon. We'd like to thank Dr. Prietto for showing us and others something he believes will catch on in his world of surgeons and surgical teams - utilizing performance apparel to reduce the fatigue and strain of long hours in surgery!

Please follow this link to view the Orange County Register article on surgeons and performance apparel.