Multimodal Analgesia and Anesthesia: Enabling Safe and Rapid Recovery for Total Joint Arthroplasty Patients

As total joint arthroplasty (TJA) has evolved over the past decade, there has been a major emphasis on early mobilization, minimizing opioid use, and reducing anesthesia-related complications. This has safely allowed for rapid recovery and outpatient TJA in many patients. Multimodal analgesia is one of the major advances in TJA that has led to this evolution. Through administering different medications with unique mechanisms of action via different routes and at different time points, multimodal analgesia has been shown to improve pain, reduce opioid consumption, and decrease complications after primary TJA [1,2].