Post-Operative Problems? Get the Rocking Chair!

After abdominal surgery, many patients experience ‘postoperative ileus’, which is a temporary paralysis of the intestines.  Patients often describe this as the most uncomfortable part of their recovery experience.  To mitigate this, there’s usually nothing allowed by mouth, until the bowels start to work again;  this is marked by the passage of wind, or flatus.  Often patients aren’t allowed home until this important event occurs.

There’s no evidence to support the standards care activities to reduce the duration of postoperative ileus.  (A standard-of-care used to help resolve ileus involves getting the patient out of bed, sit in a chair, and begin walking on the first day after surgery.)  But an approach suggested by Dr Massey of the MD Anderson Cancer Center has captured interest.  It’s described in an article in the journal Applied Nursing Research, and involves the use of a rocking chair.

Dr Massey enrolled 66 surgical oncology patients, who were randomly assigned to sit in rocking chairs or non-rocking chairs after their surgery.  The surgery was mostly colectomy, liver resection, or small bowel resection; most patients had had previous abdominal surgery. 

The patients using the rocking chairs passed wind, on average, 16.8 hours earlier than non-rocking patients.  They also required less pain medication and were discharged from hospital earlier, although the differences from the non-rockers were not statistically significant, so a beneficial effect of the rocking chairs on these two measurements cannot be supposed.  (It’s quite possible that a larger study size would have yielded significant results.)

This finding will be of interest to those who have had abdominal surgery, and experienced the problem for themselves.  They may well demand a rocking chair at their next surgical date – 17 hours of this sort of discomfort is not readily trivialized.