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. This new way of thinking represents an opportunity to get creative and collaborative to develop better episodes of care using an expanded palette of post-op pain management options.
"We're seeing novel drugs slowly try to make their way through FDA approval — longer-acting local anesthetics, drugs that combine anti-inflammatories with local anesthetics," says David Dickerson, MD, section chief for pain medicine at NorthShore University HealthSystem in Evanston, Ill., "but we've yet to see any of them really come on the scene."
