Postoperative Pain Management in Orthopedic Surgery

Abstract

Background: Postoperative pain remains poorly treated in many patients. One reason is the inadequate use of nonopioid analgesics (Pogatzki-Zahn et al., 2014). Managing postoperative pain is important to ensure a good quality of life and fast recovery after surgery (Mikami et al., 2015). Postoperative pain management is critical for optimal care of orthopedic surgery patients. Orthopedic procedures can cause severe intra-operative and post-operative pain. It is important to achieve optimal post-operative pain control since this will facilitate more rapid achievement of functional outcomes (Vadivelu et al., 2010). Conclusion: Multimodal analgesia which is achieved by combining different analgesics that act by different mechanisms and at different sites in the nervous system, resulting in additive or synergistic analgesia with lowered adverse effects of sole administration of individual analgesics, is needed for acute postoperative pain management due to adverse effects of opioid analgesics, which can impede recovery; Yet, the literature on multimodal analgesia often shows variable degrees of success, even with studies utilizing the same adjuvant medication. Key words:nonopioid, pain, analgesics, surgery, quality of life, post-operative pain