How Getting On A Patient's Nerves Can Pay Off

Main Category: Pain / Anesthetics
Also Included In: MRI / PET / Ultrasound
Article Date: 11 Jan 2008 - 2:00 PDT

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Most patients who undergo surgery are given medicine to put them out before the procedure, and pills to help them cope with the pain afterwards. Now, an innovative approach may reduce the amount of drugs you need, and the time it takes to recover. Before some doctors make a single cut, they're using ultrasound machines to help cut down on the pain.

Just weeks after undergoing surgery to repair a torn tendon in his foot, Rolendo Hernandez is already planning his next snowboarding trip. He was afraid the pain would keep him on the couch for months, but he's ready to hit the slopes.

"When I woke up from the surgery, I didn't feel any pain. I was ready to get up and get out of the hospital," says Hernandez. The reason Rolendo is doing so well after surgery is because of what happened before it. Doctors at Ohio State University Medical Center are helping to pioneer a new approach to surgery - one that delivers numbing medicine directly to a patient's nerves with the help of ultrasound machines.

"Using the ultrasound allows us to actually see what we're doing, see where we need to go, see where the needle is traveling and make it much more comfortable for the patient," says Fernando Arbona, MD, at Ohio State University Medical Center.

Normally, patients are given general anesthesia or drugs that affect the entire body. The ultrasound machine allows doctors to find a specific nerve in a patient's arm or leg, for example, then saturate only that nerve with medicine. By focusing on a single nerve, patients don't spend as much time in recovery, don't take as many pain pills afterwards, and in some cases, doctors can even leave a catheter in the patient to block the pain after they go home.

"It slowly drips on the nerve and it can continue giving numbing medicine directly on that nerve for several days afterwards to continue pain control," says Arbona.

For Rolendo, the hardest part of the surgery was the anticipation. After getting the ultrasound-guided nerve block, he says it was all downhill from there.

Doctors say numbing a specific nerve can also help in rehabilitation because a patient's motion isn't limited by pain. Right now, only certain hospitals offer this technique because of the expertise required to do it.

Ohio State University

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