Dr. Shervin Naderi shows how to clean your nose after rhinoplasty without damaging healing incisions. Use ointment liberally and often, but never push Q-tips deep inside, which can tear sutures and cause bleeding. Heavy ointment melts and moisturizes to prevent scabs.
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Good morning. I'm going to demonstrate cleaning of the nose after rhinoplasty. I have another video on our website, on the YouTube site as well. We've demonstrated cleaning and lubrication and taking care of nostrils and rhinoplasty post care. But what I've noticed two or three occasions is that patients have gone too deep with the Q tips and actually have disruptive sutures or stitches and caused a nose plate. So I'm going to show you a little modified technique so you don't have to go in that deep. The second thing that I see way, way too frequently is not enough ointment. There's lots of incision around the nostrils, and those incisions have to heal, and there's going to be a little bit of bleeding. Since I don't pack the nose, that blood is going to get dried up. And we don't want it to have dry blood there. We just want it to be nice and moist and lubricated. That way the incisions close nicely, the incisions heal nicely, and the sutures that are all dissolvable fall up pretty quickly. So I'm going to demonstrate that right now. First thing is the issue with the peroxide. In the other video that I demonstrated, I had gone in a classic method.
That I've used for many years.
But again, I'm going to hold back on that a little bit just because.
I've seen some patients going a little bit too much. So really, the peroxide, you're just cleaning around the nostrils, you just want to clean just so you make sure there's not a whole lot of blood or crust or scabs or debris. I'm not really going inside the nostrils. And if I go, it's just really right here. It's really not going in. In the previous video, I, I had shown going a little bit more and twirling it around. But again, patients had gone in too deep and disrupted sutures and stitches and caused nosebleeds.
So the second thing, which is much, much more important than even the peroxide, is the ointment.
And I want to show you how much ointment we're going to put. So if the camera looks here, I don't know if it's in focus or not, but look, this is how much ointment I want. A lot of ointment. And what you're doing is you just smear it on here. It's almost like icing on a cake. You're taking the ointment. If you watch the Q tip hasn't even gone inside the nose yet. I'm just kind of packing around, gently putting it here, covering all the sutures on the bottom. Now, your body temperature in 5 or 10 minutes will melt this and it'll drip right in. People get bothered by this because it plugs up the breathing for a few minutes, but it melts very quickly. You breathe through your nose for 5, 10 minutes and it goes in. And it's important to do this, especially the first few nights after surgery, so that you don't get dryness, you don't.
Get scabbing and bleeding.
That's essentially it.
So the cleaning is this. I don't want you to go inside. I don't want you disrupting sutures. I don't want you peeking inside the nose. There's going to be edges of cartilages, incision edges. I've seen people start digging around, getting a little bit too much of an explorer. Let's not do that. But this is the way to do it. Make sure lots and lots and lots of ointment. You're going to do this at least six times a day. The more you keep it moist and lubricated with ointment, the better. Thank you.
