You expect to feel pain after surgery, but it shouldn’t persist and become a long-term problem. If you’re experiencing chronic post operative pain, the experienced team at AABP Integrative Pain Care and Wellness can help. They have offices in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, as well as White Plains, New York, where they offer effective solutions for post operative pain that use the latest innovations to resolve your symptoms. Call the nearest AABP Integrative Pain Care and Wellness office today to find out more or book an appointment online.
Post operative pain is the discomfort you experience after having surgery. The amount of post operative pain you have depends on several factors:
Open surgery involving the surgeon making large incisions through skin and muscle is typically more painful because of greater tissue damage. In contrast, minimally invasive techniques like laparoscopy and arthroscopy only need small openings, so they’re usually much less painful.
Pain is an experience that’s unique to each person. Pain you find tolerable, someone else might feel is excruciating, and vice versa. The way your nervous system reacts can also have an influence. In the most extreme examples, someone with a hypersensitivity disorder experiences pain at a far lower threshold.
What’s pretty much guaranteed is that you will have a degree of discomfort after surgery. The anesthesiology and medical teams looking after you provide acute pain relief that should see you through until you heal and the pain goes away.
Some people continue to suffer from pain long after they should have recovered. If you’re still experiencing pain several months after your procedure, it’s important to find out why. If there aren’t any identifiable problems with the surgery site that could be responsible, you may have chronic post operative pain (also known as persistent post operative pain or PPOP).
One possible cause of chronic post operative pain is damaged nerves. The slightest injury or compression of a nerve during surgery can cause neuropathic (nerve) pain in the area that persists if the nerve doesn’t heal.
Another common cause of chronic post operative pain is pain sensitization due to a combination of tissue damage, inflammation, and pain, which causes biochemical changes. This results in your nerves becoming more sensitive to pain.
Surgery that lasts over three hours, open surgery, and pain that’s not well controlled after surgery all increase your chances of developing chronic post operative pain.
The AABP Integrative Pain Care and Wellness team offers numerous treatments that relieve chronic post operative pain. These include interventions that target the nerves sending pain messages to your brain.
Your provider identifies the nerves responsible for your pain using fluoroscopy or ultrasound-guided nerve blocks (precision injections of a local anesthetic). They can then use advanced treatments like radiofrequency ablation or iovera° focused cold therapy to destroy the nerves.
These treatments offer long-lasting relief that continues until the pain nerves regenerate.
To find out about these and other effective solutions to chronic post operative pain, call AABP Integrative Pain Care and Wellness today or book an appointment online.