Oil in the operating room
At a time when hostility against the oil industry is at a high, while politicians and editorial-office heroes call for “ending our addiction to oil,” it’s important to reflect on why oil is so valuable—so “addictive,” in the terminology of our time.
A couple months ago, I blogged that “Most of us think of oil simply as the stuff that puts gasoline in our car. But oil, thanks to the ingenuity of the oil industry, does so much more. For one, it’s the building block for thousands of petroleum products—everything from Blu-Ray discs to asphalt to stitches to lipstick. And it provides the safest, most powerful, most convenient fuel, not only for automobiles but for the freighters, jets, trucks, and industrial machinery that power our global economy. Oil makes every aspect of our lives better.”
In that post, I illustrated how oil was vital in making possible something as basic as an affordable, healthy breakfast. The other day, I witnessed firsthand how vital oil is in making possible a safe, effective hospital. Sitting in on a highly advanced surgical procedure, I was struck by the skill of the surgeons, the stunning advances in medical technology (almost all of which involve petroleum components), and—what I want to talk about today—everyone’s commitment to maximize safety by keeping the environment as hygienic as possible by using oil-based products at every turn.
One of the virtues of petroleum products, including plastics, is that they are incredibly resistant to bacteria, moisture, germs. Another is that they can very easily be made impermeable, protecting whatever you want from whatever you don’t want to contaminate it. They can also be made incredibly cheaply, which allows for disposable products that are never used by more than one patient.
All of this was at work in the operating room. Just about all the furniture—the chairs, the cabinets, the drawers, were made of or coated by petroleum to keep them sanitary. The patient was lying on the bed, connected to durable, flexible plastic (oil) tubes that safely delivered food, coming from a sealed plastic (oil) bag that securely stored it. Another oil tube was designed to vacuum excess fluids. There were disposable foam (oil) cradles to prop up the patient’s arms or legs if necessary—made of oil to be disposable. The disposable, sterile gloves were either latex or synthetic—i.e., made of oil. Ditto for the disposable surgical masks and head-coverings. The doctors frequently needed to throw biological material away—which, thankfully they could do sanitarily with plastic (oil) trash-bags that could be taken away leaving no trace of their hazardous contents. Imagine if these products would have been made of wood, cloth, or metal. Can you imagine the corrosion, the bacteria-traps, the health risks? Infection used to be a highly common and deadly product of surgery—and lack of petroleum products was a big reason why.
Thanks both to the medical profession and petroleum products, you can have every expectation of your next trip to the hospital being a safe one.
Source: Wikimedia Commons




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