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Dr. Pankaj Vashi
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VIDEO: Dr. Vashi - Nutritional Support, What Does This Entail?

Dr. Vashi describes how he provides nutritional support to his patients.

Dr. Vashi:
We have patients; their needs are different at different levels. So some patients are moderately malnourished where all we need is to discuss with them where dieticians usually spend some time and talk about their eating habits and just that’s all they need. Then we have other extreme of patients who are very, very sick. Who have lot of side effects from treatments that they have received, maybe it’s chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, a combination of all those. Those are the challenging patients where the nutritional needs, whether it is caloric needs, their major nutrients needs is very high and they cannot fulfill it without our intervention.

Depending upon each patients’ needs we either give them feeding, whether it’s enteral feeding where we feed the digestive track, the intact digestive tract. If that’s not true and if they are really, severely malnourished and for some reason they cannot digest the nutrients that they take by mouth, we get more aggressive with those groups of patients and give them parenteral nutrition which is in laymen’s term just intravenous nutrients which provides you not only all the caloric needs but the protein needs, the vitamin needs.

We also believe strongly in adding antioxidants which I added two our TPN and it’s pretty balanced sort of say nutritional supplementation to a point where these patients can be maintained on that for long period of time.

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