Surgeon's Tips: Stop Fogging & Improve Seal on Medical Face Masks #ORTips
Channel: George Yang, MD
Date: 2020-05-01

Surgeon's Tips: Stop Fogging & Improve Seal on Surgical/Medical Face Masks

How to video for Medical Students, Nursing Students, and people in general who want to wear medical face masks more like the Healthcare Professionals to minimize fogging, and improve the seal around the mask.  

Why is this important? The surgeon, assisting residents, medical students, nurses, scrub techs cannot touch their face mask face or head covering once they “scrubbed in” for surgery.  

When operating or assisting in an operation, you will be “scrubbed in” AKA wearing **sterile** PPE (personal protective equipment: surgical gown, gloves. 

Your head covering, eye protection and face mask is not considered sterile, so you cannot reach up to your face or head. This will break the “sterile field” and you will need to remove the glove that touched your mask.  This is considered bad form and the surgeon or scrub nurse will think you are not experienced.  

Ideally you can maximize the fit and comfort of the surgical face mask before entering surgery, to avoid fogging of your eye protection later on during the surgery.  Vision is critical. If the surgeon says to retest here or clamp there, but you can’t see through the fog or condensation you may make a mistake.  

How does this translate to regular people wearing masks during the pandemic?  Once you leave your “safe place” (your home or car) and enter a store or public building or room, you should not be touching your head, face or mask, similar to surgery.  So making sure that you are wearing face mask like you are about to help with an operation should minimize any need to touch the mask, until you have returned home or back into your car.  

Weaknesses of this video.
1. I didn’t discuss how to carefully remove a medical face mask (already many videos explaining it.)
2. Medical face masks and CLOTH DIY face masks are DIFFERENT and this may not work for Cloth face masks because the cloth is not fluid resistant and the humidity go through the cloth and still fog the glasses. 
3. When wearing a surgical face mask in the operating room, the temperature does not change.  

Condensation of water on cold metal/glass/plastic
**Some fogging can occur when your glasses get cold from being outside, then when you enter a warmer room the cold glasses will fog up from any humidity in the air and any humidity from the mask. This is similar to why a cold drink gets wet on the outside of the can or glass.  

Simple Hack
***This video does not address how to keep your glasses warm.  A simple trick is to have a second pair of glasses kept at body temperature inside your coat or jacket. When you go indoors you can remove the cold glasses and wear the warm one. Put the cold glasses against your body to warm it up and it won’t fog up once it is warm.