As I read articles this week, three very different papers created a nexus of interest and push-back against mildly dogmatic thinking in the critical care specialities. Two challenge existing anaesthesia dogma, while the third highlights the potential for missteps when incorporating new media into our practice and education.
Although critical care specialties like anaesthesia and emergency medicine are often seen from the outside as embracing change and being unafraid of dipping our collective toes into the rivers of progress, there are still many strongly held views that persist even in the face of contrary evidence.
Ketamine and persistent pain
Chumbley, Thompson, Swatman and Urch report in the European Journal of Pain the results of their double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial of a 96-hour perioperative ketamine infusion to reduce persistent post-surgical pain after thoracotomy. Notably they found that this significant-duration ketamine infusion did not reduce post-thoracotomy chronic pain.
This paper is the first quality RCT to follow thoracotomy patients for a year after surgery in the setting of perioperative ketamine. It adds to existing evidence suggesting a lack of effect of ketamine for mitigating persistent surgical pain – even though this has been a popular opinion (hope?) among anaesthetists and pain specialists in the past. The results of the ROCKet trial will provide us with more confidence in answering this question.1
Read on for anaesthesia checklists and FOAMed mistakes...
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A collection of related articles can be found here: Does ketamine reduce persistent post-surgical pain? ↩