Patients who have surgery at Prowers Medical Center now receive an added measure of pain control that lessens or even eliminates post-surgical pain for several days—even for notoriously painful procedures such as knee replacement.

John Newcomer is a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist at Prowers Medical Center. In early 2022, he and his CRNA colleagues began administering peripheral nerve blocks immediately before or during surgeries to provide better long-lasting pain relief to patients. They’ve seen so much success with the enhanced protocol that now almost every surgical patient receives a nerve block in addition to ambulatory or general anesthesia and other pain-control methods.

“We meet with patients before surgery to talk about their anesthesia plan,” Newcomer said. “We’ve found that adding a nerve block to the mixture of medications patients receive makes a big difference. The amount of oral prescription pain medication our patients need to take after surgery is now 50 to 80 percent lower.”

Numbing the Area

Interested in Nerve Blocks?

If you will be having surgery at Prowers Medical Center, ask your anesthesia provider if a nerve block is right for you.

A nerve block is an injection of regional anesthetic directly into the area of the body that will be operated on. It reduces pain sensations in the surgical area and numbs the area for up to three to four days.

“Many of our patients are coming into the recovery area after surgery with no pain or nausea,” Newcomer said. “Patients having same-day surgery procedures can often be discharged within one hour post-surgery. And by the time the nerve block wears off, they can often get by on Tylenol for pain control.”

To administer the nerve block, Newcomer first gives patients some medication through their IV to help them relax. Then he uses ultrasound to guide the nerve-block needle to the right spot and gives the injection. This takes less than 10 minutes.

A small or large area can be numbed with a nerve block, from one finger to an entire limb or side of the abdomen. “We can select the appropriate region to numb up,” Newcomer said. “We determine what will provide the ideal area of pain relief for each patient’s procedure and recovery.”

Multimodal Pain Control

In recent decades, anesthesia professionals have learned through experience and medical studies that the best, safest pain management is achieved with the use of multiple pain medications. “Multimodal analgesia” means combining various types of medications for pain relief.

Medication types that are typically combined in a multimodal anesthesia plan include local anesthetics, NSAIDs, opioids, acetaminophen (Tylenol) and alpha-2 agonists. Each has its own role to play.

“As a department, we’re using all the appropriate medications available to us to proactively treat pain,” Newcomer said. “By adding nerve blocks to the line-up, we’re providing more effective pain control. We’re also reducing the need for any one type of medication. This helps eliminate patient overreliance on opioids, which have some negative side effects, such as nausea and constipation, and as we all know now, can be dangerously habit-forming.”

Recovery Enhancement

Another benefit of nerve blocks is that patients who have less pain post-surgery are more active. It doesn’t hurt so much when they get up and move, so they’re more likely to follow through on their recommended rehabilitation plan, speeding up recovery.

At Prowers Medical Center, nerve blocks are now being used for most surgical procedures. “Any surgery that creates an incision in the body is a candidate,” Newcomer said. “It helps them all.”