Multimodal pain management and the future of a personalized medicine approach to pain

In the soon-to-be-released clinical practice guidelines from the American Pain Society, multimodal analgesia is recommended for pain management after all surgical procedures. Multimodal analgesia is a surgery-specific population-based approach to optimize pain relief by treating pain through multiple mechanisms along multiple sites of the nociceptive pathway. The reliance on multiple medications and therapies inherent to the multimodal approach also may address individual patient differences in analgesic pharmacogenetics (ie, the influence of allelic differences in single genes and the associated variability in specific medication responses). Perioperative nurses may see a shift from surgery-specific population-based multimodal analgesic protocols to a personalized medicine approach as knowledge of the genetic influences of analgesic metabolism and pain sensitivity is translated into clinical practice. Personalized medicine is proposed as an individualized pain management treatment plan that eventually may be based on each patient's genetic coding for metabolism of analgesics and pain sensitivity.