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Comparing The Cumulative Pain Patients Experience Waiting For Knee Arthroplasty To Their Postoperative Pain, Eric S. Schwenk, Richard H. Epstein, Md, Cphims, Franklin Dexter

Department of Anesthesiology Faculty Papers

Introduction: Reduction of pain is a major goal of anesthesiologists treating patients undergoing knee arthroplasty. This has been achieved traditionally through the use of regional analgesia. Although these techniques decrease postoperative pain, they inherently do not affect the longstanding pain patients experience as they wait for surgery. Our objectives were to quantify: 1) the decrease in pain achieved by surgical joint replacement; and 2) the decrease in postoperative pain achievable through femoral nerve blocks versus opioids. From a systems-based perspective, we wanted to determine how much reduction in waiting time before surgery would be necessary to achieve an equal cumulative …