Dr. Robert Whitfield uses ERAS protocol to cut postoperative pain. He starts medications the night before surgery, performs ultrasound-guided nerve blocks, and injects local anesthetic into each quadrant of the surgical field as he works. Patients wake without sharp pain and recover faster.
I think the game is really just to be prepared and not then have to react to a bunch of problems afterwards. And then by the time you get here, hopefully you're already doing better. You've lowered inflammation, you're feeling better, you're resting better, you're in a better overall state. And then we have, as a component of our overall SHARP method, a ERAS, which is Enhanced Recovery After Surgery. So basically you start some medications the night before in my program. Something for nerve pain, inflammation, and nausea. Because most people are really bothered by any kind of medication. They can be very sensitive. And a lot of my patients, as we have already discussed, don't detox very well. So we want to tailor everything as much as possible, make it very individualized. And then I, I have them do an ultrasound guided nerve block before we ever start surgery. So there's already some medication. That's helping with treatment of those areas that we're going to work on. Um, we send everything off to make sure there's no cancer, of course, but as I open an area and I get it visible, think of like a pie chart, each quadrant, once we can see it, we try to anesthetize it with local anesthetic. And then intraoperatively, we're helping provide, uh, care, just trying to be diligent and provide local anesthesia in those areas. So then patients wake up. They're not really experiencing the sharpness and tenderness that they have in the past.
