William P. Barrett, MD, had a patient scheduled for a knee revision surgery when he ran into a problem. The patient’s joint pain was so great that they desperately needed some...

Numbing nerves with local anesthetics relieves post-op pain for days at a time. Freezing them with a blast of targeted cold therapy can provide the same soothing effect for...

Patients who are discharged hours after procedures that used to require inpatient stays to recover don't hurt any less. Today's pain control methods must advance along with...

How did your widely used scale come to be? I met Donna Wong, the late co-author of the scale, in 1981. We shared a concern about...

Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) protocols involve standardized care pathways that limit post-op pain with minimal use of opioids. Patients who enter the pathways...

Patients who go NPO in the hours leading up to their surgeries aren't physically prepared for the physical trauma they're about to endure. "Surgery is a major stress on the body," says Steven Bisch, MD,...

With opioid-sparing protocols firmly positioned as the standard for managing post-op pain, surgeons and anesthesiologists have become masters of multimodal analgesia, perfectly combining a little bit of this with...

The concept of enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) has been around for more than 20 years, introduced in colorectal and abdominal cases as fast-tracked "accelerated...

The use of continuous nerve blocks to manage post-op pain provides many benefits. Patients require fewer opioids, which lowers their risk of opioid misuse and eliminates...

A safe and speedy recovery is the result of a comprehensive process that begins long before incisions are made and continues well after patients exit your facility. From the moment...

A hernia repair will always cause patients some level of discomfort. However, there’s a big difference between an annoying ache and acute pain — or worse, chronic pain...

Help Total Knee Patients Recover in Comfort; Alternative therapies reduce their reliance on opioids to manage post-op pain.

There’s no silver-bullet, one-size-fits-all replacement for opioids in the management of post-op pain, so clinicians are experimenting with various drugs and techniques,...

The opioid epidemic has forced frontline providers, clinical researchers and even patients to think about better ways to manage post-op pain. It’s no easy task. Ask 10...

Amid our nation's opioid crisis, providers are shifting their focus to formulations and methods that make post-op pain more bearable instead of eliminating it completely....

One of our facility's surgeons is well known for sending patients home after surgery with 3 opioid pills. That's it. His patients are initially surprised and wonder if that will be...

Who Has Access to Your Medications? Reduce diversion risks with these drug security and disposal solutions.

In the absence of antibiotic alternatives, physicians in the early 1900s had no choice but to treat every infection with penicillin. Chronic pain went through a similar...

Medication errors are all too frequent in the OR. A recent observational study identified an error in 5.3% of all anesthesia medication administrations — roughly 1 of every 20...

If your anesthesia providers rely on inhaled anesthetics and opioids, they're behind the times. As Gary Lawson, MD, says: "I used to knock out patients. Now I knock out...