A short excerpt from a YouTube video (May 5, 2025) by Robert Whitfield MD arguing against routine use of surgical drains. In this clip Dr. Whitfield states that drains do not prevent hematoma or seroma formation and can increase infection risk because they are foreign plastic material entering from the outside.
Why does everyone do drains still?
I think it's just.
Because they're churning butter in the olden days.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, drains will get you two things. Or actually, let's do it this way. So everybody who operates for a living knows that a drain does not stop a hematoma or a seroma, but can lead to an infection because it's basically a piece of plastic.
That'S coming from the outside of your body on, Right.
So anything that comes outside in is bad. And if you don't need to have it, you don't want to have it. So as soon as we would do cancer operations and we were faced with, you know, putting drains in folks because we had these huge, you know, wounds to deal with, we wanted to get them out as quickly as we could because we knew the longer we left them in, the higher the chance of an infection. And so, to be honest, if you listen to folks who had drains and had drain site infections, there's not a lot of good things said about that.
