Abstract:

Thoracotomy is among the most painful prosedures of surgery and may cause severe postoperative pain. This pain persists in 21-67% of the patients that undergoing thoracotomy and causes lots of postoperative complications. The results of post-operative pain undertreatment include increased morbidity and mortality, mostly due to respiratory and thromboembolic complications, and development of chronic pain. Effective pain management is very important for the patients who undergo thoracotomy. The aim of pain management is preventing on serious complications of uncontrolled postoperative complications and postthoracotomy pain. There is not a single source of postthoracotomy pain, thus, pain control must be provide at each level. In this connection, multimodal analgesia including pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic tehniniques be prefered in posttohoracotomy pain management. There are many approaches for postthoracotomy analgesia and a multimodal approach is probably the most effective. In multimodal analgesia pharmacological and nonpharmacological techiniques are used together for thoracotomy patients. Thus, in multimodal analgesia regimen for postoperative pain, reduces the amount of analgesic consumption and with minimal drug side effects. Opioids, and non steroidal antiinflamatory drugs are used for the pharmacological analgesia. Cognitive behavioral techiniques and periferal techiniques are among the non pharmacological analgesia techiniques. Nonpharmacologic techiniques provides pain control with reduced analgesicrelated side effects. Nurses which have pivotal roles in postoperative pain management must use nonpharmacological techiniques with analgesics for effective pain relief with minimized analgesic consumption

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