Surgical headlamp - preview

The bigger of the 2 headlamps I bought on ebay has arrived, the 800+ peso one. around 5 weeks from order time. Arrived 2 days ago and I've been busy so I haven't had time to test it out fully. More or less it looks like this.

So far i've used it to dress one patient and excise a lipoma. It seems bright enough and the light collimation/concentration is OK enough for what I call (I'll mention this headlamp classification in my blog post and my paper if and when it comes out) "against the light" usage with or without loupes, although I havent tested it like that yet.

"Against the light" is one of the classifications of medical headlamp usage that I invented. Its the most demanding. It essentially means its bright enough that you can use it to see into a deep body cavity which is in dark shadow because of OR lights. This situation often comes up with a resident coz the surgeon is operating somewhere else nearby and he's hogging the OR lights.

Elastic straps are slightly too small for my head but I can fix that easily. Battery charger is not the best and can damage the 18650 lithium batts if left to overcharge the batt but it works. The major modification I need to do is to make a remote switch so i can turn it on and off without breaking sterility (thats one of the differences between civilian and medical headlamps in an older blog post.).

After full modification and testing, I plan to write a post here and maybe enter it into next year's PCS surgical innovations contest thingie. Maybe even write a paper. But for now, it looks promising.

Again, this is only a preview. Stay tuned for a future blog post with a more in depth review.

The end