Dr. J.C. Gerancher answers the question: 'Preventing Pain After Surgery?'
Question: What Can I Do To Prevent Pain After Surgery?
Answer: The most important approach to preventing pain around the time of surgery, and long-lasting or chronic pain after surgery is to have a comprehensive approach to pain management.
What a comprehensive approach to pain management should entail is the use of regional anesthesia, or local anesthetic numbing medicines around the time of surgery.
The other approaches towards comprehensive pain management are using something called multi-modal analgesia. And that's incorporating many different drugs to achieve the effect of pain management. These drugs should be drugs that aren't your run-of-the-mill narcotic or opioid-type drugs, but other drugs that help in little bits create a picture that treats pain.
The third part is using pre-emptive analgesia. Pre-emptive analgesia means all these processes are put into place before pain even occurs.
These things taken together have been shown to be the best way of preventing both acute pain around the time of surgery and chronic pain afterwards.
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