Breast Augmentation: New Pain Reduction Method
Breast Implants, Recovery, Techniques, breast augmentation Comments Off
There’s a new technique for plastic surgery pain relief that will be getting more attention from plastic surgeons.
Two plastic surgeons in Virginia and Maryland noticed a slightly different way to administer pain killers. It made that is making a large impact in a first study on 200 patients.
Dean Jabs, M.D. and Franklin Richards, M.D., like most other board-certified plastic surgeons, are very observant and noticed that most liposuction patients have very little pain afterwards.
So why not have the same technique for breast enlargement patients?
In liposuction, the treatment areas receive large injections of a medication to lessen bleeding – but that medication, lidocaine, is also a potent pain killer.
When performing a breast augmentation, the standard procedure for many is to make a pocket – for the breast implant — under the large chest muscle, the Pectoralis major.
Part of creating that pocket involves making incisions in the chest muscles. And that’s what creates a lot of recovery pain for patients, even though “pain pumps” are often put into patients’ chests before they wake.
Narcotics are available, but the side effects can be unpleasant.
The surgeons thought a better way might be injecting long-lasting pain relief into the chest muscles before creating the implant pocket. Additionally, they used another long acting anesthetic, Marcaine, in any muscle that had to be cut.
Soon, recovery room nurses were asking the doctors what they were doing differently. Breast implant patients treated with the pain medications at the start of the procedure were found to be more comfortable in recovery and leaving sooner. (Read more about the breast augmentation pain relief study.)
The physicians then compared 100 patients who received the new treatment with another 100 similar breast augmentation patients who did not have the extra medications.
Women treated with the extra measures went home sooner, used less pain medication while recuperating, had less nausea and were more comfortable during recovery.
What’s your experience with pain killers?
admin @ January 13, 2009