Use of multimodal anesthesia in the treatment of postoperative pain

Abstract

ABSTRACT BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Hippocrates already said 2400 years ago: “relieving pain is a divine work”. Postoperative pain is an important symptom, because it affects the patient’s recovery and because of the risk of pain chronicity. And as a treatment option, there is multimodal analgesia, mentioned in several studies as the best approach, although opioid therapy is still the main treatment for pain after surgical interventions. The objective of this study was to describe the use of multimodal anesthesia in the treatment of pain, especially in the postoperative period. CONTENTS: A literature review was performed on studies that explained multimodal analgesia, its components, and which analyzed therapeutic drug options. The theme was approached from a consultation of articles published in LILACS, Scielo, Medline and Pubmed, in English and Portuguese, between the years 2012 and 2022. The keywords used for research were: “multimodal analgesia”, “multimodal anesthesia”, “surgical procedures” “postoperative”. In the results, examples of drugs that are part of multimodal analgesia in different procedures were listed. CONCLUSION: In this way, multimodal anesthesia has demonstrated its benefits for the treatment of postoperative pain in various surgical procedures. However, further studies are needed so that this modality can be used more widely.