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What Are Some Of The Most Common Causes Of Pain After Surgery?

Dr. Eugene Viscusi answers the question: 'Causes Of Pain After Surgery?'

ByABC News
November 14, 2008, 1:26 PM

— -- Question: What Are Some Of The Most Common Causes Of Pain After Surgery?

Answer: As any patient will tell you, following surgery, motion is extremely painful. So it's important to identify rest versus motion pain.

This is important because patients have to be active and do their physical therapy to recover. That's the patient's perspective.

We could also look at the specific kinds of pain. There's the local tissue injury pain, which we refer to as nociceptive pain. There's also potentially nerve injury and that's the neuropathic or burning component. Some patients have cramping and that's the visceral component. And then some patients also have muscle or muscle spasm and that's another component.

Now these are represented in different ways for different kinds of surgery and have to be targeted specifically for the particular kind of surgery that you will be having.

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