(COLUMBUS, Ohio) – Burn treatment not only focuses on wound care and pain management at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, but doctors also pay very close attention to how much a patient is fed.
“Nutrition is a crucial part of the healing process for those with severe burn injuries,” said Dr. Larry Jones, director of the Comprehensive Burn Center at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center. “We’re very aggressive, even with the smaller burns, making sure patients get feeding tubes within six hours of their arrival.”
Jones says the body needs excessive amounts of protein in order to heal burn wounds. If extra protein is not fed to a patient as part of their diet, the body will rob protein from itself, leading to serious loss of weight and muscle mass.
“That’s something we really need to prevent, so we feed them three to four times the amount of protein they would normally eat in a day and boost their calories by up to 140 percent,” said Dr. David Evans, medical director of trauma services and director of nutrition-support services at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center.
