Can the use of pain pumps after surgery affect wound healing? Post-surgical pain is one of the most difficult problems to endure. If there is bleeding or inflammation, patients are usually quick to accept the doctor’s advice to use medication. However, patients are often hesitant to use post-operative analgesia when their doctors recommend it. On the one hand, they worry about the unbearable postoperative pain, and on the other hand, they are afraid of the adverse effects caused by the use of analgesic pumps. Today, we would like to introduce the postoperative analgesic pump to you, and hope that you can change your previous biased concept of analgesia after reading it. How does the doctor know if I am in pain? In the hospital, a visual analog scale is generally used to grade post-operative pain. The doctor will give the patient a ruler with numbers from 0 to 10, with 0 being no pain and 10 being extreme pain. The patient pulls the ruler to different numbers according to his or her pain, and the physician makes a general assessment of that patient’s pain based on the pain score. In general, cardiothoracic surgery and orthopedic surgery have the most intense pain, and many patients can have a pain score of 5 or more, or even 10. Ear, nose and throat, ophthalmology and other surgeries are less painful. The pain level is often mild in the hours after surgery because the anesthesiologist will give a certain amount of long-acting analgesics near the end of the surgery to ensure that the patient wakes up and to reduce the pain and discomfort after waking up; however, the patient will often feel particularly severe pain that night, and then gradually get better. What is an analgesic pump? An analgesic pump is a small device that can control the rate of drug infusion. One end is connected to a certain amount of analgesic medication prepared by the anesthesiologist for the patient, and the other end is connected to the patient’s body, which may be a small tube coming out of the hand or back. Normally, the drug in the analgesic pump is infused slowly and continuously into the patient to ensure a relatively small dose of basal analgesia. Some analgesic pumps also have a handle that can be pressed when the patient is in pain, and the pump will infuse additional pain medication to meet the patient’s analgesic needs. Of course, the analgesic pump also has some special designs to prevent patients from repeatedly pressing it multiple times and over-infusing the analgesic medication. The typical duration of analgesic pump use is 3 days, depending on recovery from surgery. The benefits of an analgesic pump outweigh the disadvantages. Will an analgesic pump affect my / my child’s IQ? No! Will a pain pump affect wound healing? No! Will there be any drug dependency from the use of the pain pump? Very rarely, almost never! There are many benefits of post-operative analgesia. 1. The first and most obvious is the reduction in post-operative pain level. When the pain is reduced, the patient will feel better, sleep well at night, and eat well during the day. 2. 2. Post-operative analgesia reduces pain, and at the same time, patients naturally dare to get out of bed early, which reduces the time of bed rest and the incidence of deep vein thrombosis caused by prolonged bed rest. The orthopedic patients can perform functional training as early as possible. 3. Because of the reduction of pain, patients dare to cough and cough up sputum, which reduces the occurrence of postoperative pulmonary atelectasis and crushing pneumonia. 4. Acute pain will turn into chronic pain if not controlled in time, and timely postoperative analgesia will reduce the incidence of chronic pain. 5. Postoperative analgesia can also promote bowel evacuation and reduce the occurrence of myocardial ischemia, etc. Of course, there are certainly advantages and disadvantages of things. Objectively speaking, there are a few side effects of analgesic pumps. The drugs contained in the analgesic pump are mostly opioid analgesics and some auxiliary analgesics, such as tramadol, NSAIDs, etc. The side effects are mostly caused by these drugs. The most common side effect is nausea and vomiting. However, nausea and vomiting itself is a common reaction after surgery and is related to many factors. For example, abdominal surgery, inhalation anesthesia, etc.; there are also factors of the patients themselves, such as women, non-smokers, people who are prone to motion sickness and seasickness, etc. The use of postoperative analgesic pumps increases the incidence of postoperative nausea and vomiting by about 20%, but it cannot be said that once postoperative nausea and vomiting occurs, the postoperative analgesic pump is the cause. The solution to nausea and vomiting is simple: suspend the drug infusion for a period of time and add some antiemetic medication. The nausea and vomiting will usually go away after two or three days at most. Other side effects include itching of the skin and respiratory depression, which rarely occur. It is possible for patients with high epidural analgesia to have hypotension. These side effects will usually both resolve when the infusion is stopped and will not affect the patient much. In summary, the benefits of postoperative analgesia far outweigh the disadvantages. How to use the analgesic pump appropriately? One of the most common misconceptions of patients is that they think analgesics are harmful to the human body, so even if they use an analgesic pump, they do not need to use it and do not press the self-infusion button on the analgesic pump. Every time a patient with an analgesic pump gritted his teeth and showed off to me with beads of sweat: “Doctor, I’m in pain, but I can bear it, I’m a strong-willed person! We all feel helpless, why do we have to endure it when we have already received post-operative analgesia service? The correct way to use the analgesic pump is to press the self-control button to relieve pain when you feel pain. There is no need to worry about what to do if you press too much: analgesic pumps with self-control buttons are set to a lock time, and when two presses are too short, the second one is automatically considered invalid. In other words, even if the patient presses infinitely, the amount of infusion will not increase infinitely, and the maximum amount of medication will be under the control of the anesthesiologist, and this amount is safe for the patient. Proper use of an analgesic pump can reduce pain by at least 50%. By the way, misconceptions about pain are extremely unpleasant and can greatly reduce the patient’s quality of life and increase mental stress. In addition to acute post-surgical pain, hospital pain clinics have a large number of patients with chronic pain who suffer from pain, some of whom are even close to a mental breakdown. However, some concepts are deeply rooted in the hearts of the Chinese people: pain is not a disease, pain is tolerated when it can be tolerated, and pain is not taken when it can be taken without medication. It seems that Chinese people have a natural resistance to painkillers. As a result, many chronic pain patients tend to take medication to relieve their pain and then reduce it on their own; after reducing the medication, the pain recurs and the dosage is increased again, which has a very limited therapeutic effect and is harmful. Rational, regular, stepwise use of analgesics under the guidance of a physician will greatly increase the effectiveness of pain treatment. Rational use of pain medication rarely results in drug addiction. Pain can afflict everyone around us, and we must abandon the concept of “tolerating pain when we can, and not taking medication when we can”. The right way to solve pain is to seek reasonable and standardized treatment for pain. Old professors often say that morphine is the best gift God has ever given to mankind. We also hope that human beings will accept God’s gift happily and openly when they are undergoing the hellish torture of pain. Every anesthesiologist and pain physician is willing to act as a messenger to give this gift to the people who are going through the torment. We hope that everyone will accept the view of postoperative analgesia correctly and reasonably with the help of anesthesiologists and get through the post-surgical recovery better.