Pain Pumps Caused Shoulder Cartilage to Deteriorate, Patients Say
July 23rd, 2008 amy
Some Utah patients who had surgery to repair dislocated shoulders say a product used to control their pain after surgery actually ended up causing a lot more, KSL News reports. Pain pumps have been used in nerves and other areas without any problems at all. But the shoulder joint is a very small space, and for some reason, when the amount of medicine in the pumps goes into the joint, some research suggests the medicine is toxic and can eat away the cartilage.
Twenty-eight-year-old Erika Creech has become used to lifting her daughter with one arm. In 2004, Erika learned she had no cartilage in her left shoulder joint, just bone against bone. “It started grinding and clicking and not working, and I had a lot of pain with it,” she tells KSL news.
Her problems began several months after an operation to fix a dislocated shoulder.
According to the news report, hirty-one-year-old George Limantzakis had the same surgery with the same results. He said, “The pain just started escalating months after the first surgery. The pain is constant, 24 hours.”
Limantzakis and Creech’s surgeon took X-rays of their shoulders and told them they were among a dozen of his patients who had lost their cartilage. In some cases, the bone itself had deteriorated. After reviewing the cases, Dr. Charles Beck realized they all had one thing in common: “The use of a post-operative pain pump catheter,” he said.
The pain pumps feed medicine into the body to reduce pain after surgery. New models had just come out that gave patients a lot more medicine. Dr. Beck used them in 16 patients, 13 lost their cartilage.
This condition, called Postarthroscopic Glenohumeral Chondrolysis (PAGCL), is one of the most common complications that can follow shoulder surgeries. In 2006, a paper was presented at a meeting of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons showing evidence that the use of intra-articular pain pumps could be responsible for this painful condition. The study looked at 152 patients who had undergone anthroscopic shoulder surgeries. Twelve of the patients developed PAGCL. All of the patients who developed the condition had received pain pumps during their surgeries. The use of the intra-articular pain pump was the only factor that the PAGCL patients had in common.
