The anesthetists and their “pain service” are responsible for early post-operative pain therapy and will put together a treatment plan. You will receive basic therapy with regular pain medication. If this dose is still insufficient to achieve a tolerable level of pain for you, further reserve medication will be administered by the nursing staff on the ward.
To do this, please provide us with appropriate feedback. You will be asked several times a day about your pain level on a scale of 1-10 to ensure that your pain therapy is set correctly. The aim is for pain at rest to be below 3-4 and pain on movement not to exceed 5 points.
Hip replacement operations are considered to be much less painful than knee replacements. Here, the usual painkillers are usually sufficient for a tolerable level of pain. A multimodal pain concept is usually required for knee prostheses.
During the operation, we inject a cocktail of pain medication directly into the tissue around the knee joint. This usually results in about 10 hours of pain relief. It also reduces post-operative bleeding and painful swelling. An intravenous pain pump is also used as required during the first 48 hours. This allows you to control your pain medication requirements yourself. Pain catheters to directly anesthetize the main nerves of the leg are only necessary and useful in rare cases. They always restrict mobility and are only used in special cases. For example, in cases of drug intolerance or otherwise unmanageable pain. Nerve blocks are then very effective.