Dr. Kern Singh joined Dr. Brian Cole and Steve Kashul on Sports Medicine Weekly to talk about helping patients avoid relying on pain medication to manage their pain. Recent studies have shown that one in three patients become dependent on narcotics following surgery.
Implementing a program designed to reduce opioid consumption and provide adequate pain control requires a commitment to a multidimensional approach. Patients no longer have to worry about the ill-effects of narcotics after having spine surgery as this new approach has greatly minimized, and more frequently, eliminated the need for narcotics postoperatively.
Dr. Singh, a spine surgeon at Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush and Professor at Rush University Medical Center, along with Dr. Asokumar Buvanendran of Rush University Medical Center, developed a new postoperative spine anesthesia protocol that decreases and/or eliminated the need for post-surgical narcotics. The approach, referred to as multimodal analgesia (MMA), uses a combination of medications administered before, during and right after surgery to more effectively control pain. The two physicians have created a protocol that has removed any need for a morphine pump following spine surgery, with all patients going home with only oral medications following their procedure potentially the same day.
