Despite intuitive benefits, published clinical studies show conflicting data regarding the impact of postoperative pain management on surgical outcomes.
Unclear outcome benefits warrant caution against assuming gains from pain management; leaves open need for definitive trials.
Intuitively it seems obvious that unrelieved, severe acute pain after surgery may have a number of undesirable effects [1]. Many experienced clinicians maintain that the immediate postoperative course as well as long-term outcome may be influenced by the quality of pain relief after surgery or trauma [1, 2]. However, there are conflicting data from published clinical studies concerning the beneficial effects of postoperative pain management on short-term and long-term outcome of surgery [3].
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Harald Breivik (1998) studied this question.
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