The physician will know that you're aware of reuse and won't risk having anything go wrong. The tactic, although rarely used, appears to work. Jose Nazari, an electrophysiologist at several Chicago-area hospitals, has reused 1,500 cardiac catheters over the past four years. He says he knows of only one time when a patient requested a fresh catheter. The hospital complied.
Critics claim that hospitals purposefully keep patients in the dark when it comes to reprocessing.
If you are a knowledgeable patient and are alert just before your surgery, there are other precautions that you can take or that a family member can take on your behalf. You can ask the nurses to wait until you're in the procedure room before unwrapping the instruments. That way, you can inspect the labeling to see if the devices were reprocessed. Once they are unpacked, it can be very difficult to tell the difference between new and reused devices. If the instruments are already unwrapped when you arrive, you can ask to see the packaging in the waste bin.