Pain Management
We Are Here To Help You Manage Your Pain
Pain can affect a patient's recovery and overall quality of life. This makes pain management important for your comfort, recovery and physical and emotional well-being. We treat your pain as a complex condition — not a symptom — allowing us to provide fast, personal care that meets your needs.
Pain affects each person in different ways. Because each patient is different, we use the most helpful and safe ways to target and relieve your pain so you can go back to everyday life.
Pain is common after a procedure or surgery. Swelling and healing can cause both emotional distress and physical discomfort. The amount of pain you feel after a procedure or surgery can be affected by the kind of treatment, your health and other medical conditions and your pain management.
Partnering With You
We need you to be involved and informed in your pain management.
Pain treatment may include medicine called opioids. Opioids work on your nervous system to block pain signals going to your brain. These can have serious side effects and should be limited to the lowest dose possible. Our goal is to use less of these medications and instead use powerful non-opioid medications instead. Often, more than one non-opioid medication is used in combination to block the pain signal at multiple points. These medications include anti-inflammatories, local anesthetics (like the dentist uses) and gabapentin, which is a nerve pain medicine.
Epidurals or nerve blocks may be used. These put the nerves to sleep with medication. This may last for several hours or even days depending on the type of medicine or injection used.
Non-medication pain management is also important. This may include finding ways to make you more relaxed, such as meditation, and may incorporate physical therapy as well.
We use simple questions to understand the pain you may be having during your stay. The better you understand these questions, the better we can help you. Typically, you will be asked to rate your pain from numbers 0 to 10. Having no pain is the number 0. Number 10 is pain so severe it prevents you from doing any activity.
Most importantly, if you need something speak up. Let us know if you have pain and if your pain is not being controlled so that we can do something to help.
