A short lecture-style YouTube monologue by Dr. Tabatha Barber arguing that fasting (NPO orders) aids healing after surgery by diverting the body’s energy away from digestion toward recovery. The speaker gives a clinical anecdote from early rotations, explains that nurses follow explicit "NPO" orders after major procedures, and states the physiological rationale that digestion requires energy and thus resting the gut supports healing.
My first year of going into externships as a medical student, getting out to the hospital and doing rotations, I quickly learned on the surgical rotations that fasting heals. So we would actually have to write an order, npo, which means fasting, and we would write this order. So the nurses knew that they were not allowed to feed the patient because the patient just went through major surgery, and they need to divert resources away from their gut and from their digestive system over to their abdomen or their hip or whatever, just had surgery. So we know that we have to give our gut a rest and we have to divert resources, because it actually requires resources. It requires energy to digest food and to break down food. So fasting heals.
