Bovie Medical Corporation is far and away the largest producer of battery operated cauteries in the world. We have discussed, in past blogs, that a cautery is thermal, and an electrosurgical generator does not use heat to cause its effect. Though our current cauteries incorporate many safety features, our new cautery has a patent pending on an unique safety design.
I can’t tell you how many cauteries we make in a year, but it is a bunch. We print a warning on the cautery body, on the cover cap in red so it stands out, on the peel pouch, in thirteen languages on the instruction sheet, and again with a neon label on the top of the box with safe disposal instructions. When you push the activation button on the cautery after removing the cover cap, the high temperature model reaches over two thousand degrees almost instantly. (I once saw a doctor at a trade show touch the tip on purpose, while seeing it glow…let’s see four years of college, a high enough GPA to get into medical school and not enough common sense to know what he was getting ready to do was not a good idea).
Safe Disposal
Our warning label, among other things, talks about the safe disposal of the battery operated cautery. The safest way on our current device is to break off the tip with a hemostat (you can easily do it with your fingers, but if you push the button inadvertently, it’s going to hurt) and replace the cover cap. The product can then be safely disposed. If those two steps are followed, the odds of a trash can fire is completely eliminated. Unfortunately, despite seeing the glow of the tip, on rare occasions this procedure is not followed and the product is disposed of with all of the paper products in the trash can. If there is enough weight on the button to depress it, two thousand degrees and paper is not a good combination in a trash can. On top of that, some people want to recycle the batteries, but that takes a fight because the molded body doesn’t want to easily give up its contents.
Innovation
Meet two of our engineers, Alex Reznik and Fred Baron, our Engineering Manager (Fred is our oldest employee at 79. When we bought Fred’s machine shop 15 years ago and he was going to retire. Well, 15 years later, that retirement keeps on being pushed out a little longer... maybe a future blog will be about Fred). Alex and Fred tackled the two problems mentioned above. The end result is wonderful!
For safety precautions, we still want users to break off the tip, but this time if they forget, the odds of the cautery activating accidentally is nearly impossible. The new cautery design also allows for the batteries to be removed by snapping off the rear of the cautery quite easily. Two problems solved and we hope to file our 510k this month so we can start shipping the product. We sent our first production run out to our customers with a "not for human use" imprint, but for show and tell.
The first of the new cautery design was placed in doctors hands, and their feedback helped make some subtle changes to the planned design. While at Bovie we continue to advance some very technical products. However, we continue to improve any of our products, when necessary, or if a potential problem is discovered.
Be on the lookout for the “new” battery operated cautery from Bovie Medical Corporation. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions, or leave a comment below.
J. Robert Saron
President, Bovie Medical Corporation
