'Multimodal' pain management -- an opioid plus another form of analgesia -- is recommended after surgery Black patients are nearly a third less likely to get multimodal analgesia, however, and more likely to receive potentially addictive opioids only The reasons for this disparity aren't clear MONDAY, Oct. 21, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- After Black patients undergo a surgery, they are much more likely than their white peers to receive only an opioid for post-op pain relief, rather than a more nuanced combo of analgesics, a new study finds. So-called "multimodal analgesia" is the recommended way to go, experts say, but Black patients are 29% less likely to receive it.
“We know that multimodal analgesia provides more effective pain management with less need for opioids, which are highly addictive. It should be standard practice, especially in high-risk surgical patients,” explained study lead author Dr. Niloufar Masoudi , an anesthesiologist and research assistant at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore.
Her team presented its findings Saturday in Philadelphia at the annual meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists. The researchers looked at data for 2016 through 2021 from a single hospital. They compared the post-op pain management of 2,460 white patients against that received by 482 Black patients in the intensive care unit for the first 24 hours after complex, high-risk surgeries.
Masoudi's group defined multimodal pain relief as an opioid painkiller plus at l.
