Dr. Robert Whitfield says sleep is the main driver of post-surgery recovery. Stick to your normal sleep schedule to reset your circadian rhythm and lower the cortisol spike surgery causes. He also mentions a German device called the human regenerator that reduces stress activation and supports healing.
You only rest and recover when you sleep. So all of my patients know, and I talk about this to them before surgery. The morning of surgery. I talk to the family after surgery, like, make sure they get the rest. So keep them up after surgery. So I operated today, and I told every caregiver to keep their loved one awake and try to get them on a normal sleep wake cycle. So have them eat dinner, have them try to go to bed at a given time. That's pretty normal for them. And then have them get up in the morning because that's going to help their circadian rhythm. That's going to help with resetting their cortisol levels, because I just caused a big cortisol surge by operating on them. And so when you come to my office the day after surgery, I have something called the human regenerator. It's this big device. It's from Germany, and it helps lower sympathetic activation, increase parasympathetic activation, reset electron transport. So the whole point is to calm everything down.
