What is the traditional recovery time after a complete shoulder replacement?
Dr. Randall Malchow: Traditionally, what happens is a patient comes in as an inpatient. They have their surgery and then they go to the orthopedic ward where they’ll get hooked to a morphine pain pump through their IV and they’ll stay two to three days because the pain after shoulder replacement is severe. It’s significant enough that without the morphine pain pump it would be difficult to do. The average length of stay is typically two to three days in the United States and in Canada. When did this home remedy first become available? Dr. Malchow: Probably several years ago, around 2005, a couple of institutions in the United States looked at that. Duke University and the University of Florida in Gainesville looked at the possibility of using continuous peripheral nerve catheters for pain control after shoulder replacements. We had been doing it for many years with other surgeries and we felt confident that we could export that to the shoulder replacement patient population and do that
