Gabby Reece approached her knee replacement surgery three months ago the way she approaches life: holistically. “I knew I was going to try to avoid the opioids as well I could,” Reece, a former professional beach volleyball player who’s since dedicated her career to speaking and writing about health and fitness, told U.S. News on Monday.
For years, such a request has been near unheard of, added Dr. Scott Sigman, an orthopedic surgeon in North Chelmsford, Massachusetts, who’s the team physician for the U.S. Ski Jump Team. “I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I can’t say I’ve ever had a patient come in and say to me, ‘I want you to do my total knee replacement, but I don’t want any opioids.'”
But the pair, who was in New York City to promote the Plan Against Pain campaign, is aiming to change that by raising awareness of alternative pain relief options such as oral and intravenous anti-inflammatory medications and pain-relief drugs that doctors can inject into the surgical site.
Such alternatives are especially important in light of a new survey finding that 1 in 10 orthopedic and soft tissue surgery patients in the U.S. report becoming addicted or dependent on opioids after their operations — a lot more than the 1-in-15 stats historically quoted, says Sigman, the former chief of orthopedics at Lowell General Hospital who serves on Governor Charlie Baker’s Commission to Examine the Feasibility of Establishing a Pain Management Access Program. “Surgery is the inadvertent gateway to substance abuse,” he says.
That can be particularly true among professional athletes, whose livelihoods depend on a speedy recovery and who often have personality traits that make them vulnerable to substance abuse, adds Reece, who opted for knee replacement surgery after years of professional pounding — plus spending 12 hours a day on her feet while filming the reality show “Strong” — rendered her knee practically useless. “From the sports side of things,” she says, “you know tons of athletes that go in for one thing and then six months later, you hear a nightmare story that now they’re dealing with their addiction.” She was determined not to become one of them.
Non-opioid pain relief isn’t even a short-term sacrifice to patients, says Sigman, who began emphasizing alternative options in his practice about two years ago and found that patients reported top-notch pain relief, not to mention that they returned home sooner and reduced health care costs by avoiding opioid-related complications. “Our patients are incredibly satisfied; it’s a much better, smoother experience than we’ve really had before,” Sigman says.
For Reece, who continues to heal using ice, physical therapy and other non-pharmaceutical treatments, recovering opioid-free hasn’t been easy, but it’s worth it. “Surgery hurts,” she says, but pain has a purpose. “It’s there to communicate with you,” she says, by telling you to move slower or rest, for instance. Ultimately, she says, the power is in the patient’s hands — to both ask for alternatives to opioids after surgery and to carry out the physical therapy treatment plan afterward. “As we want to empower the patient,” she says, “the other side of that message is still always going to be: You’ve gotta do the work too.”
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Volleyball Star Gabby Reece Champions for Non-Opioid Pain Relief originally appeared on usnews.com
