Rethinking Post-Operative Guidelines for Enhanced Recovery

Dr. Christina Prevett // #GeriOnICE // www.ptonice.com 

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, join Modern Management of the Older Adult division leader Christina Prevett discusses reframing the conversation around post-operative guidelines for physical therapy treatment.

Take a listen to learn how to better serve this population of patients & athletes, or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

INTRODUCTIONHello everyone and welcome to the PT on Ice daily show. My name is Christina Prevett. I am one of our lead faculty in our geriatric division. I'm coming to you from the University of Ottawa, so if there's a little bit of background noise, that is exactly why. But today, what I wanted to talk to you about, and the reason why I'm on here a little bit early is because I feel like this is gonna take me a little bit of time to get through, is to start reconceptualizing our post-operative guidelines when we're thinking about not just musculoskeletal injury, but many of our post-operative protocols when we're thinking about early healing and early recovery. in the post-operative window. And so I just posted a reel on our ICE Instagram account that's talking about hip precautions and how we have research going back from as like synthesis of research systematic reviews of research going back as far as 2015 to show that these precautions that were intended to reduce risk of early hip dislocation actually don't do that and what they actually do is they exacerbate post-operative deconditioning and they increase fear of movement. And we see this all the time in clinical practice, right? Individuals go for surgery. They're given these restrictions. These restrictions are not evidence informed. They're never discharged. And what it does is it causes people to disengage with activities of daily living, with sports, with activities that they enjoy. They become more sedentary. And then downstream, we see that the amount of postoperative deconditioning is greater and their capacity to engage back into the things that they enjoy before surgery is less. You know, I've had clients that have said to me, I'm so much worse. Like, my pain is better, but I feel worse than when I went in for surgery. Like, why did I even get this done if I could have dealt with this surgery? And so over the last couple of months, I have really been thinking and noodling on this. I did a podcast on the pelvic section on our Mondays around how our pelvic restrictive guidelines around lifting are not evidence informed at all either. And that when we remove those guidelines, and we have now multiple RCTs that have said, you know, other than don't have penetrative intercourse for six weeks, when we say here are your buoys, and here's how you can progress based on how you feel. not only do you not see an increased risk of postoperative complications in those individuals with liberal restrictions, but they actually have a reduced pelvic floor burden in that postoperative window. And so that early recovery is actually enhanced. And so we have to kind of understand where some of these guidelines come from and how are we as a profession in allied health going to start pushing the narrative and where is our role in that because I think we have a really massive role. So the first thing that needs to be acknowledged that is really front of center when it comes to post-operative guidelines is that when we do research and we take surgeons and we have done cross-sectional surveys, not we other researchers, and asked, you know, where did these lifting restrictions come from? Like, where is your evidence? Or do you believe that your restrictions are evidence-informed? In our pelvic literature, we saw that 75% of urogyne surgeons recognized that the reason for their restrictions is because this is what they have always done. And only 23% of the surgeons surveyed believed that the restrictions that they were giving were evidence-informed. Now that is a massive problem, right? We so often in medicine come through the lens of let's avoid bad outcomes that we don't acknowledge that the lack of doing something by restricting a person's movement can actually lead to adverse outcomes down the road, right? Because yes, they're not saying we did X activity and caused X outcome, but the removal of activity, now what we know in all of our accumulated literature on the effect of deconditioning on trajectory of aging, clinical geriatric syndromes, and post-operative deconditioning that can lead to changes in independence, that deconditioning also needs to be acknowledged in our algorithm of what we are thinking when it comes to our post-operative guidelines. And so what we are acknowledging first is that one, we have evidence that does not support restrictive guidelines in many different examples, right, our arthritis literature, not sitting in bed post cardiac surgery, our lifting restrictions post pelvic surgery, we now have a variety of different areas across different organ systems, musculoskeletal surgery, cardiovascular surgery, urogyne surgeries where we are acknowledging that our restrictions are overly restrictive and that that restriction does not create better outcomes. The step forward that I want to make is that not only are they not leading to better outcomes, but that subsequent deconditioning by overly restricting a person is an adverse outcome in itself in the opposite direction. And what this is highlighting is that we have a big knowledge translation gap problem. We acknowledge in many areas of medicine that this exists, but this is front of center for our allied health clinicians around what we are allowing in our practice or what we are acknowledging in our practice. And so you're gonna say Christina, okay, where are these restrictions coming from and why as a clinician am I hesitant to push back on these guidelines despite the fact that I know that these are not evidence-informed, right? So because there's a hesitancy on the side of the clinician and We want to acknowledge those. Those are the elephants in the room, right? So the first thing is around the fear of an adverse outcome, right? When we don't do anything, we don't have that same feeling of responsibility if something was to go wrong, right? Because I didn't push them. So it wasn't me that caused that adverse outcome, right? And we can't always avoid adverse outcomes, but what we do a lot at MMOA is we try and flip the script of, you know, we think about the harm of loading people, but what's the harm if we don't load them? And that's a slower churn, a slower burn, but it's important to acknowledge that that's relevant too, right? So that fear. But the fear also comes from going against the surgeon and liability and referrals. And so I want to acknowledge that piece and I want to acknowledge it on a couple of different stances. Number one is that our messaging is never to, you know, speak negatively to the surgeon and speak about the person. We speak about the concept. And so the way that if I'm trying to remove restrictions that have been placed on somebody or deviate from a protocol, which I tend to do a lot, when the surgeon has outlined this, I will say where your surgeon was looking at was this is their scope. They're looking for lumps, bumps, infection, early complications. Where my lens is here. based on their assessment of you two weeks ago, they may have felt X from where I am assessing you today. Here's where I think our steps are going forward. So it is not bashing the surgeon. It is not going against the surgeon. It is using my scope as a doctorate level clinician to be able to make further recommendations going forward. And as a newbie clinician, the thought of going against the protocol set out by the surgeon used to terrify me, right? I'm a rule follower and our medical system has placed medicine at the top, which, you know, they have the brunt of the liability. I understand where that is coming from. But as I get into my research degree or when I get into my research career and I acknowledge the level of the evidence when I see the outcomes that are so much better when I ditch these protocols and load people more aggressively earlier and I recognize that a surgeon has never never actually rehabbed a person after their surgeries, it changes my mind, right? I would never go up to the surgeon and say, you know, you are going to go with that anterolateral approach for that hip replacement. I really think you should take a posterior approach. It would be better. Because that's not my scope of practice, right? That's not what I do. That is not where my skill set is. So why are we so shackled by a surgeon telling us what our job is, who has never, never rehabbed a person after their surgery, has not actually seen them for more than 15 minutes in an appointment after their surgery. And so I I would never take continuing education from a PT who has never treated the condition that they are teaching about, right? Like you would never go to see me and teach in geriatrics if I have never rehabbed a person who is over the age of 65. So why is our system created in a way where we are taking rehab advice from someone who has never done rehab, whose medical degree does not actually have an exercise prescription component in a lot of cases. And so that acknowledgement has really shifted my perspective on this is maybe foundational work that they are giving and they are catering also to the lowest common denominator, right? Like when I am working with a person and they are trying to give a blanket statement guideline that has exercises on it, they have to cater to the person with the most amount of deconditioning in order to believe that this protocol is safe for everyone. And we acknowledge as clinicians that that blanket statement never ever works, including blanket protocols, because our people come in with a variety of different chronic diseases, comorbidities, positions, supports, biopsychosocial considerations, motivations and drives, and musculoskeletal reserve around that postoperative joint. And so what we have to acknowledge is the flaws in the system, but I'm not saying that as a bad thing, I'm saying that as this is where I come in. High five me in, this is my job, and I need to advocate for my profession in making an opinion on this, right? And this is where we need to lock shields with medicine and surgery, not blast each other with swords and acknowledge where our scope is and where their scope is. The final thing is around liability, right? And I think the post-operative guidelines around joint replacement are a really good example of where the liability, we have to be acknowledging liability, but we also want to make sure that we are thinking on the other side of the equation, where when we are working with individuals post-operatively, we are worried about post-operative dislocations. And what we see is that those with low musculoskeletal reserve going into surgery and have a fall in the early postoperative window are the ones who are more likely to dislocate or those that have a size fit issue or get a deep infection in the early postoperative window. So what we are doing by deconditioning is we are impacting one of those risk factors in a positive way. If we are creating more deconditioning, if we are lacking reserve around that joint and we are not supervising them, potentially in the early post-operative window, that is where we can have liability on creating an adverse outcome. But we don't have any evidence around pushing individuals too far from an exercise perspective early on, creating adverse outcomes. Now, if that was to change, sure, we're gonna change our strategy, but we want to really be thinking about this from a clinical and critical lens, because it's really important that we acknowledge these things. So, What do I think we actually need to think about with our post-operative guidelines? Or what do I think we are missing with our post-operative guidelines? I feel like we are missing our confounding variables that are going to dictate how quickly we're going to be able to progress individuals. So what do I mean by that? We acknowledge as clinicians, because we do this all the time in our assessments, that there is going to be different things in a person's background that is going to allow us to be more aggressive in rehab or is going to cause us to take a slower approach. Those are not acknowledged in our postoperative guidelines right now. So what are some of those things? One is our level of frailty, burden of clinical geriatric syndromes or complex comorbidities. Secondary is musculoskeletal reserve going into surgery or the amount of deconditioning we are able to stave off with early postoperative mobility. And so what we are acknowledging or what we want to acknowledge is that some individuals, we obviously have that early protective phase around a graft. I'm not saying that we're just going to blast that out of the water, but we know that after two weeks, most of our collagen synthesis is there and now it's remodeling in order to get stronger. And that remodeling requires load. But then we create a brace around an individual for six weeks where we're actually not creating a lot of loading through that joint or we're not actually having pulsing forces from our muscles that are acting and contracting to start creating tensile forces in order for our collagen fibers that are coming down or our healing fibers that are needing that load in order to get stronger. And there's a huge amount of variability in our in vivo studies around the strength of collagen resynthesis and that range is probably related to musculoskeletal reserve. And so, one, we need to acknowledge that yes, we have that early protective phase, but their amount of reserve going into their surgery is going to be a predictive factor of how aggressive we can potentially be post-operatively. Their complexities with respect to comorbidity are going to incur a higher or lower inflammatory load that is going to dictate how fast we're gonna be able to progress exercises, right? When we really step back from all of our comorbidities, a lot of them are related to inflammatory cascades, depending on the organ system that is impacted by the disease. And so when we have individuals with a high comorbidity burden, they are gonna have a higher inflammatory load, and that higher inflammatory load is going to impact how fast we're gonna be able to get individuals working, but on the flip side of that, exercise is anti-inflammatory. but it's going to slow down our progressions. So all of this to say is that one, we need to be confident in our assessment skills that includes early postoperative management. We need to acknowledge that our role is one of critical thinking that allows us to take information medically from the surgeon and some of their early protective phase issues, and then be able to progress them as we see fit, because we're the ones who are seeing individuals that are progressing and we are responsible as well for their wellbeing and their capacity to return to activities of daily living. And that baseline musculoskeletal reserve going into surgery is going to be a big confounding variable or a big protective variable in order to think about their postoperative reserve. And so where I see our postoperative guidelines hopefully going in the next several years is one, blanket statements are gonna go out the window, right? We are going to remove these lifting restrictions. We are gonna give individuals buoys, okay? We're gonna say, hey, you just had surgery on X joint. This is what I want you to think about. I want you to be thinking about gradually returning to movement within your comfort zone, and I want you to look for X, Y, Z. And if you are experiencing X, Y, Z, that is your body telling you that you've probably pushed it a little bit too far today, okay? You're not hurt. sore is safe, but it's your body telling you that you just had surgery and we need to stay within these buoys and those buoys are going to change. And as you get further from surgery, you're going to be able to experience more and more of life and you're going to be able to come back to more and more things and that is going to be okay. And we're going to be able to guide you along that process. In rehab, what we tend to do is think about things very linearly, where we say, okay, we're going to do range of motion passively, range of motion actively, maybe in combination with some isometrics, and then we're going to load through range. I think that's a huge mistake. And you guys can give me your thoughts on this. I feel like, you know, Ice talks a lot about and not or, that we need to be strengthening through the range that individuals have in that moment. And then as they gain more range, we're gonna continue giving them strength in the upper ranges that they are now gaining, right? I think waiting to exercise through range or strengthen through range actually deconditions the joint more, and it ends up being a huge issue. We see this all the time in rotator cuff post-op management, right? There's a protective phase that now, thankfully, a lot of the surgeons in my area are not prescribing to, thankfully. And then we go range of motion first, and then we go strengthening through range, and then getting that strength in those upper ranges, especially over 90 degrees, is a bear in rehab. And where I have seen a shift in my practice, and I've seen better outcomes anecdotally from it, is that I am strengthening through range and with weight bearing earlier, and they're gaining their strength back a lot faster. And so I think this and not or approach to orthopedic post-operative rehab is going to be important. Now, I acknowledge that I'm in an outpatient setting and I'm going to be seeing people who probably have a little bit more musculoskeletal reserve going into surgery than others who are in skilled nursing facilities, et cetera. But that means that your deconditioning effect is going to be that much more detrimental, right? When I have a person who doesn't have a lot of reserve going into surgery and then I see that dip postoperatively, that is going to be very, very impactful for them versus my person who has more reserve going in. And so it makes me not change my stance, but actually be more diligent about my loading principles in that early postoperative period because that deconditioned individual cannot handle more deconditioning. And we see this all the time, right? It's why our hip fracture research is so poor. You know, we have those statistics that if you break your hip and you need a, or if that your 50%, 50% of people who have that surgery end up in a nursing home or don't end up making it over a year or whatever that may be. And that's likely because they have a period of deconditioning on a deconditioned person that creates a lack of reserve around that joint. And then they aren't able to come back from it. So our role in rehab becomes even more urgent where we need to prevent that from happening, right? We, we can't wait. on a lot of those things. Obviously weight-bearing status is going to be one of the things we have to be mindful of, but being able to strengthen a joint around non-weight-bearing status in order to try and reserve as much capacity around the hip and pelvic musculature as we can is going to be really, really important. So I hope all of that made sense, right? We have this gap and I want us to have so much strength in our convictions around how important it is for us to push back against these guidelines. Yes, it's scary, right? We don't like pushing back against medicine because sometimes I think we are not as confident as we should be in our doctoral level education and our evidence is on our side. And so we don't have to be jerks about it, but we have to acknowledge that our outcomes could be so much better. And I want to let you center in on the fact that you are the expert here. The surgeon is the expert in the actual surgery. You are the expert in managing them after. That handoff should be seamless. And it is important for us to advocate. And until we advocate and have respectful conversations that, yes, are scary, yes, your heart rate is going to be up, yes, you're going to feel like you have that adrenaline going through your system, but have the evidence in your back pocket Acknowledge your scope of practice and your skill set and make sure you are there to best serve your older adults. All right, that is my rant for today. If you were trying to see us live in person over the summer, Julie is in Virginia Beach, July 13th, 14th, so this upcoming weekend. Jeff Musgrave is up in Victor, New York, July 20th and 21st. And the entire crew is up for MMA Summit in Littleton, Colorado, July 27th and 28th. So if you were looking to see us on the road in the month of July, you have a couple of opportunities. If you're hoping to get into our online courses, our next MMOA level one starts August 14th. We are just finishing up our last cohort and we have a bit of a break for the summer. And then our advanced concepts level two course is starting October 17th. So I hope you all, I want to know your thoughts around this. Am I going crazy? Am I on the same boat or same page as you all? And what can we do collectively to make this a little bit better? All right, have a wonderful week everyone and we will talk to you all soon.

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