Coffee helps improve focus, mental alertness in the operating room

MANILA, Philippines - I’ve been a coffee drinker for as long as I can remember. For a Batangueño like me, it’s hardly surprising. Coffee helps perk me up; I feel much more awake after one cup.

That perky outlook carries over to my work as a general and cancer surgeon, where focus and mental alertness is a must. Our motto in the operating room, “There is no practice here,” speaks volumes about the seriousness of our jobs. Committing a mistake would cause an impairment in the patient, or worse, death.

Take extreme emergencies like trauma, for example. Right then and there you have to decide what surgical treatment needs to be done to save the patient’s life; you make sure the patient is brought to the operating room, and you perform the surgery at once and as quickly as possible.

Life-saving

The surgical operation is a life-saving procedure in some situations. Throughout this scenario, a surgeon must remain in a heightened mental condition: only in such a state can the surgeon make on-the-spot, accurate decisions and perform the surgery with precision, calm and deliberation, while doing so at a quick, life-saving pace.

Furthermore, a surgeon’s heightened mental powers allow him or her to successfully avoid the dangers that accompany delicate surgical procedures. One example is the surgery done in cases of esophageal cancer.

When treating esophageal cancer through surgery, the surgeon must work within an affected area that is hard to access. While operating, the surgeon must avoid touching other structures surrounding that particular organ; this makes the procedure very challenging, technically. To add to the difficulty, such operations last between four and six exhausting hours. For some reconstruction surgeries, it takes eight to 10 hours.

Focus

However, not all operations are life-and-death situations. Minor conditions like lymphoma and sebaceous cysts require simple excisions, lasting only 10 to 15 minutes. However, mental focus remains important there because the surgeon is responsible for a person’s health.

Over the course of a year I would handle around 300-320 operations — almost one operation a day. On exceptional occasions, I would have up to nine cases in one day. Those days are both mentally and physically rigorous.

To be able keep my focus, I handle things one operation at a time — and around four to five cups of coffee for the entire day. Before my first operation of the day, I would have a cup of coffee. It helps keep me mentally sharp right from the start, whether it’s one or nine cases.

While I start my day with a cup of coffee in the morning, my mental preparation for surgeries starts the night before. Before I go to sleep, I would repeatedly run the surgical process through my mind. It’s a way of psyching me up for the task.

Sometimes, if these are interesting or rare cases, I go to my library or search the literature on the Internet. It helps to update oneself on the recent developments in those cases, and find out if there’s any new treatment.

As difficult as it can be for us doctors, we’re also aware that it’s even tougher for our patients there in the operating room. So we owe it to our patients to be prepared and be at the peak of our condition, physically and mentally, when they need us to perform surgery on them.

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To know more about the other health benefits of coffee, visit www.positivelycoffee.org. The author is a general and cancer surgeon at the Philippine General Hospital Medical Center and Manila Doctors Hospital, both in Manila. He is also a professor in surgery at the University of the Philippines-College of Medicine Manila. He placed sixth in the June 1980 Medical Board Exams and is currently the chairman of the Surgery Department of St. Luke’s Hospital Global City in Fort Bonifacio.