Dr. Robert Whitfield explains how to reduce post-surgery pain by starting the night before. Sleep well, eat right, get a nerve block, and during surgery the doctor injects Exparel, a long-acting numbing agent that works for up to a week.
Because programming to your brain starts from the moment surgery starts. So what we try to do is stop the signal to the brain before it starts, right? So I started something the night before, right? To calm down the nervous system, right? We're trying to prevent, so that everybody understands, the big cortisol surge. Mm-hmm. 'Cause the number one maker of cortisol on this conversation in the world right now is me, Dr. Rob. I make cortisol. It's what I do for a living. So I want to shut that down. So sleep hygiene, proper nutrition, proper supplementation, proper preparation before surgery. You come here, ERAS the night before, marked pre-op, pre-op ultrasound-guided nerve block. So there, you've done all these things to calm down what's going to be a little bit of a cortisol surge, right? In my practice. In some practices, it's like a nuclear bomb went off. Yeah. So what we're trying to do is make it as small as possible. So in the operating room, we'll say I'm doing an explant. Think of like a pie chart. As soon as I get a quadrant of the pie chart cleared on the inside, I'll numb it up with a long-acting lip line aesthetic called Exparel, which is just liposomal bupivacaine. Once it sets up, it takes 2 to 3 hours to set up. It lasts for a week.
