Regional anesthesia and pain medicine
-
Women are entering medical school in record numbers, but multiple male-dominated medical specialties still exist, including pain medicine. It is not well-understood how gender diversity in academic pain medicine faculty affects fellow matriculation between female and male applicants. ⋯ Pain medicine fellowship programs with a female program director were significantly more likely to have female fellows.
-
Reg Anesth Pain Med · Sep 2019
Intermittent bolus versus continuous infusion popliteal sciatic nerve block following major foot and ankle surgery: a prospective randomized comparison.
Foot and ankle surgery is associated with severe pain that can be reduced with continuous popliteal sciatic nerve block. We tested the hypothesis that programmed intermittent bolus (PIB) delivery of local anesthetic provides superior analgesia to a continuous infusion (CI) regimen. ⋯ Both CI and PIB regimens provided excellent analgesia, low opioid consumption and high patient satisfaction. While there was no difference in analgesic outcomes, PIB dosing resulted in a more profound motor block.
-
Reg Anesth Pain Med · Sep 2019
Addition of dexamethasone to local infiltration analgesia in elective total hip arthroplasty: a double-blind, randomized control trial.
Pain following total hip arthroplasty is significant, and effective analgesia is associated with an improvement in functional outcomes. Dexamethasone may facilitate the action of local anesthesia, but its role as an additive to a local infiltration analgesia (LIA) mixture in hip arthroplasty settings has not been investigated. We hypothesized that the addition of dexamethasone to local anesthetic infiltration improves analgesic outcomes following total hip arthroplasty. ⋯ The addition of 8 mg dexamethasone to LIA did not reduce 24 hours morphine consumption but was associated with limited improvement in short-term analgesic outcomes and a reduction in postoperative nausea and vomiting. Dexamethasone had no effect on functional outcomes or long-term analgesia.
-
Reg Anesth Pain Med · Sep 2019
Bolus epidural infusion improves spread compared with continuous infusion in a cadaveric porcine spine model.
The administration of epidural anesthesia during labor is a common technique used to reduce the pain of childbirth. We sought to compare standard infusion strategies of continuous epidural infusions (CEI) with programmed intermittent epidural bolus (PIEB) to assess the length of spread in terms of vertebral body length. Based on previous clinical data in humans, the PIEB was associated with improved pain control and decreased total dose of local anesthetic. We hypothesized that the PIEB was associated with increased spread when compared with CEI. ⋯ We demonstrated increased spread of epidural contrast with programmed intermittent bolus strategies. This supports previous evidence of improved patient outcomes with PIEB strategy compared with CEI, and encourages the use of PIEB in the appropriate patient population.