The anesthesia team provides perioperative (during and after surgery) acute pain management for patients undergoing surgery. Regional anesthesia is the process of injecting medication near a nerve to block the sensation of pain from any part of your body that requires surgery, such as the arm, leg, or lower back. To achieve this, various techniques are used to manage acute pain, such as single-shot peripheral nerve blocks, peripheral nerve catheter placement, local anesthetic infusions and continuous neuraxial techniques.

Postoperative pain (postoperative pain) is an acute pain that begins with tissue trauma during the surgical process and gradually diminishes as the tissue heals. The severity of pain is determined by the length and width of the surgical site, the duration of the surgery and the subjective nature of the pain. Postoperative pain relief has important effects on patient prognosis, quality of life and patient satisfaction.

Postoperative pain creates a stress response in the body. In this case, if pain, which is considered as a stressor, cannot be adequately controlled in the postoperative period, physiopathologic responses to pain begin to develop in the organism. Tachycardia (increased heart rate), high blood pressure, increased oxygen consumption, decreased gastric and intestinal function, urinary retention, atelectasis, hypoxemia, deep vein thrombosis may occur. In addition, elevated blood glucose levels due to increased release of catecholamine and cortisol hormones in the neuroendocrine system, negative nitrogen balance, tendency to infection, delayed wound healing, muscle spasm, immobility and psychological fear, anxiety and insomnia are physiopathologic responses to pain.

The multimodal analgesia method, which combines different type of analgesics and the administration of these analgesics by different methods, has been found to be very effective and successful in the relief of postoperative pain. This method provides effective analgesia with fewer side effects. Today, systemic, and regional analgesia methods are frequently used in postoperative pain. Systemic analgesia is applied intravenously or intramuscularly, while regional analgesia applications consist of central (such as epidural) and peripheral (such as interscalene) nerve blocks.

With the development of technology, patient-controlled electronic pump devices have been used in both systemic and regional analgesia methods. Depending on the type of surgery, patient-controlled analgesia allows the administration of pre-programmed drug doses under patient control with an electronic pump through a permanent catheter that can be placed directly into the vein or in different parts of the body. Patient-controlled analgesia allows the patient to self-administer analgesics in case of pain. Thus, effective and high-quality analgesia is provided, patient satisfaction is increased, and drug-related side effects are minimized. From this point of view, the relief of postoperative pain with multimodal analgesia methods has significant effects on the patient’s quality of life and patient satisfaction. At the same time, multimodal analgesia not only reduces postoperative pain, but also reduces the occurrence of life-threatening complications.

With these methods, which is used in many surgeries in our clinic, the comfort of the patient is extremely high, and many complications can be prevented. For this purpose, patients are evaluated by the algology specialist in the preoperative team and special attention is paid to ensure that their pain is minimal or zero when waking up from surgery.