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P A I N
M A N A G E M E N T
Privacy for pain patients
If your facility has a C-arm, an imaging table and time on the schedule, you're probably hosting or considering pain management injections. They're quick, inexpensive and profitable. (See "Adding Pain
Management Painlessly," Outpatient Surgery Magazine, October
2012, tinyurl.com/mczp6fm.)
You can work in your existing ORs and procedure rooms, but for preprocedure handling, there's a lot of value in a separate space. Pain
patients tend to have difficulties with standing, sitting and ambulating.
The bright lighting, stiff chairs, captive audience and anxious pediatric
ARE STEROIDS NECESSARY?
Injecting Other Fluids Also Effective Against Pain
hen anesthesiologists at Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine reviewed the existing literature on chronic back pain
treatments, they weren't surprised to find that epidural injections
of steroids were more effective than intramuscular injections of steroids,
saline or local anesthetic. But they didn't expect to discover that epidural
injections of saline or analgesic were also more effective for pain relief than
intramuscular shots were.
In a study appearing in the October issue of the journal Anesthesiology
(tinyurl.com/k86wqfd), the researchers report that the simple act of injecting
liquid into the epidural space seems to offer relief, without steroids' potential
adverse effects. This may have been overlooked, they note, since previous
studies compared epidural steroids against control injections that were not
placebos but actual treatments.
While they don't recommend an end to the use of steroids in pain management, they point out that, if further research supports their findings, smaller
— David Bernard
doses might provide the same benefits.
W
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O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E | O C T O B E R 2013
