When the doc or a nurse puts on surgical gloves, is that to protect them or the patient? I know that they always scrub up before doing anything, so I wonder why the gloves?
Why does it have to be either/or?
It’s both. Protect the healthcare workers from whatever the patients may have, and also protect patients from anything that may be living on the healthcare worker’s skin, or got carried from the last patient somehow.
They wash their hands, but some bacteria may remain, especially if they’re not scrubbing for a good minute. Scrubbing up for ten minutes before surgery is one thing, but when nurses are running from patient to patient on a hospital floor, it’s not the same, although they do wash their hands or use the Purell-type antibacterial gel. But, sadly, not all of them are all that careful about the hand-washing. Most of them are, and I’m sure the healthcare workers on the Dope are the good kind. But I’m in a field where I get to work in a hospital… and some people are half-assed about it. Which is why you get things like a C. diff outbreak out of control. 
So be happy about the gloves!
The book by Jurgen Thorwald, The Century of The Surgeon details the story of the development of surgical gloves quite well. Before such gloves were invented the operating room personnel cleaned their hands in various cleaning agents, like a dilute solution of carbolic acid. There was a doctor at Mass General Hospital in Boston who had a romantic interest in one of his operating room nurses. She reacted badly to the carbolic acid solution leaving her hands chapped, raw and sore. It looked like she was going to have to give up being a surgical nurse which the doctor didn’t want. He valued her both as an excellent sugical aide and also personally. So he set out to find some protective cover for her hand that would be sterile and would eliminate the need for her to disinfect her hands. Working with rubber experts for either Goodyear or Goodrich (I forget which) he developed the surgical glove.
So they began in order to protect one person from having to disinfect her hands and now provides protection against transferring microbes and the like in both directions.
I found fascinating antigen’s comment that not all medical people are as careful about handwashing between patients as they could be. Over 150 years after Ignaz Semmelweiss found that disinfecting hands in carbolic acid between maternity patients reduced the incidence of peurperal fever (generalized infection resulting from childbirth) from like 50-60% in hospitals to under 1%, hand washing is still not alwayss rigorously done.
Believe it or not, prior to the AIDS epidemic, gloves were not used routinely, and hand washing was only recomended before touching patients to protect them.
In nursing school back in the cave, We were told not to wear gloves to change colostomy bags, because it would make to patient feel like you thought they were “dirty” :eek: :eek: :eek: By the same token we were told that if we wanted to wash our hands after such a procedure, we should do it out of the patient’s site, again, to avoid embarrassing them.
I am sooo old…sigh.
From what I’ve read a century ago people were usually worse-off for having a baby delivered by a doctor who sees hundreds of patients and transfers all sorts of germs. It was actually safer to have a mid-wife who had few (in comparison) patients take care of you.
I would say the gloves are to protect the patient more than the doctor. Skin is pretty darn tough for microbes to get through, but sticking those microbes into someone’s open wound is very dangerous, especially since many on a doctor’s hands are antibiotic resistant.
picunurse has largely made the point I was going to make. Although I trained as a psychiatric nurse the hospital I trained at provided all the surgical and medical facilities for psych patients throughout the state. Using proper sterile techniques it is possible to perform many procedures without ever touching the patient except with items from the sterile pack. Putting on gloves to perform a procedure was largely frowned upon. I can recall passing IG tubes and catheters without needing gloves. I can’t recall whether nurses wore gloves for IV cannulation back then but I can think how it could be done without needing them. I will check with another oldtimer later.
That’s odd. My dentist always washed his hands upon entering the treatment room - noisily so I would know he did it I assume.
At least one colorectal surgeon said (mostly tongue-in-cheek, I hope) that pre-op scrubbing and the use of gloves wasn’t really necessary. It made more sense to him, just to spread some newspaper over the O.R. floor and wash well after the surgery. 
Actually I think the main difference was between a hospital and at home, whether by doctor or midwife.
According to the book The Cry And The Covenant (fictionalized story of Semmeweiss’ career) the practice in maternity hospitals was for the doctor to proceed directly from patient to patient. The difference in the incidence of peurperal feve between home care and hospital care for childbirth was one of the factors that caused Semmelweiss to start looking into the possibility of what he called “contact infection.”
Eew, eeeeww, ewwww, eeeeeew.
My understanding (based on a wide variety of reading, from childhood until now) that the worst culprit was not only going from patient to patient, but going straight from autopsy to patient – a point made when a colleague of Semmelweiss’s died after cutting his finger during an autopsy, from an illness suspiciously similar to childbed fever.
Yup. When I was doing the phlebotomy part of my internship at the hospital this summer, they taught us to put new gloves on at the patient’s bedside so they could see we were doing it. Same thing for opening a new needle from a sterile pack.
They feel more comfortable, and they don’t have to worry about whether I washed my hands after the last guy, or if I’m re-using needles to save money.
Yes, when Semmelweiss read the autopsy report on his friend a light went on. Combining that with the difference in infection rates in hospital or at home he came to the right conclusion. He even did controlled experiments with rabbits that, by today’s standards, proved his thesis. Unfortunately, medicine was far from scientific and at the time and controlled experiments meant nothing. Antiseptic procedures had to wait another what, forty years?, for Joseph Lister and Pasteur’s germ theory before anyone paid attention.
And from the sounds of things here, not everyone has gotten the idea firmly implanted yet.
Did he mention anything about the time it took to clean beneath his fingernails afterward? :dubious:
From the other side of the embarrassment coin:
I recently had to have some physical therapy on my shoulder. I had no real problems with the original therapist, but when she went on vacation she was replaced by a guy whose hands for some reason tickled me every time he touched me. Since he was working on my armpit, he could barely get through a session because I would constantly recoil and laugh uncontrollably. While I was wondering what to do about this, other than to request another therapist, I noticed someone in the area wearing rubber gloves. I was reluctant to suggest it (I don’t want your filthy hands touching me?), but finally I explained that I thought it might help with the ticklishness, and in fact it did. The only problem was that at most of my therapy sessions I had to remind him to put on the gloves, which felt very awkward.
A lot of it depends on the glove…
There are sterile individually packaged gloves meant for surgery and other invasive procedures, then there are “exam gloves”, which are so cheaply made that they are measured by weight (about 100 per box), rather than actual count.
The “surgical” gloves (Biogel™, Triflex™ etc.) are a lot more expensive, and actually do provide the patient some protection. The bulk “exam gloves” are mainly to protect the practitioner.
In fact, one of the most disgusting things I ever witnessed while working at a hospital was the dietary workers handling food with these exam gloves, under the impression that they were “sterile”. HEH! These gloves weren’t even clean!
As for clinicians washing their hands improperly, I’ll have to dig up some cites, but IIRC, the deaths from this “oversight” run in to the thousands yearly (cross contam, MR “super germs”, etc)