Pain Management

Hey there dr. Amy alderman at North Atlanta plastic surgery I just wanted to talk to you about how we’re going to manage your pain after surgery always on my patients forethought they really are concerned about how we’re going to treat them and it’s an important issue one we want to give you the best experience possible we want to give you the safest care possible and we also want to try to limit your opioid use because as you know we’re in that opioid crisis here in the u.s. We are instituting a very aggressive multimodal treatment for your pain I’m really excited to offer this to my patients one part of it is you’re going to be taking some medication before surgery tylenol in particular and a specific dose because it takes a couple days for to get up to the right level to be effective so that it’s working at the time of surgery you’re also going to start another medicine called neurontin which we’ve used in different aspects of medicine it’s a works on nerve pain we’ve now found that it’s really good for surgical patients it’s not at they contain non narcotic that can be started before surgery all these are to get your levels maximized so that they’re working and in your system by the time we make incision during the case we’re going to be doing special things to also help for some of my patients especially the bigger cases you’re going to get X / L it’s a long-acting numbing medicine and it works for about three days so I used up all of my abdominoplasty or tummy tuck patients in addition to that that kicks in about five seven hours after surgery you’re also going to get a short-acting numbing my uninjected all the incisions and that kicks in at the early time periods you’re gonna have an injectable that’s short and long acting and for all my patients they always get this short acting medicine dr. joiner is going to do some special things during surgery from an anesthetic standpoint to optimize your experience too we’re going to be giving you some portal and some other medicines such as a steroid to optimize your pain relief and minimize your swelling and then post-operative we have another regiment opioids aren’t part of the mix but your need firms can be a lot less given that other modalities that we’re using I just want to explain to you that this is really important to us we really want to be on the forefront and how we manage pain and I think just using narcotics alone is a very old-fashioned technique and that there are a lot of other modalities that we can use and are much better and optimizing your experience please feel free to comment out with this if you want to me to explain this in greater detail I look forward to working with you thanks so much