Opioid-Free Shoulder Arthroplasty

Background and Significance: Opioid-based analgesia has been a cornerstone of patient care in the setting of acute pain for the last century and has undergone logarithmic increase over the past twenty years. Unfortunately, the rise in utilization has brought with it a rise in opioid-induced side effects. These include constipation, nausea/vomiting, hyperalgesia, delirium, addiction/withdrawal (with 67% of those prescribed a long-term opioid program still on opioids at an average of 4.8 years of follow-up), and in some cases even respiratory depression/death. Patient expectations of opioid-based pain medication has driven a rapid rise in outpatient opioid prescriptions including both short and long-acting opioids. These prescriptions have in turn become a source of significant mortality in the United States, with nearly 20,000 deaths due to opioid overdose in 2014 alone. There have been momentous efforts made in identifying synergistic compounds to use for acute pain management in the perioperative time period to begin to minimize the opioid requirement for pain control. These studies have focused on nerve modulation with gabapentinoids, intravenous and local administration of sodium-channel blockers such as lidocaine and bupivacaine, and even increased interest in non-steroidal anti-inflammatories and acetaminophen. At this time, no study has looked at the possibility of utilizing a multi-modal acute post-surgical pain control pathway that did not include some form of opioid medication for the general population. Arthroplasty continues to be a dominant procedure in the orthopaedic armamentarium and accounts for well over a million surgeries done in the United States per year. With the ability to utilize targeted nerve blocks by anesthesia, and the increasing data showing efficacy of multi-modal therapy for acute pain, we propose a patient care pathway that is completely free of all opioid-based medications. From the time that patients are checked in until the time the patient follows up in clinic, they will utilize a pathway designed to eliminate pain and opioid-related side effects following shoulder arthroplasty. Our hope is that a well-designed pathway for total shoulder arthroplasty can quickly be modeled for other surgical procedures in an attempt to minimize the negative effects of opioid utilization both acutely and on a societal level.