Psychological interventions in the pain management after hip and knee arthroplasty: a mini review

Abstract

Pain has very tremendous impact on the patients’ outcomes after knee or hip arthroplasty. It is a psychological experience and caused by the interactions between sensory-discriminative, motivational-affective, and cognitive-evaluative dimensions. But acesodyne medication is the most commonly used method in clinical to reduce pain symptoms after arthroplasy. Few psychological interventions are employed in the establishment of guidelines in pain management. Several studies have proved that pain can be exacerbated and inhibited by the psychological variables. We summarized the predictors for postoperative acute pain and chronic pain in this review. Except the surgical trauma and social factors, the psychological factors have huge influence on the occurrence of the two types of pain. Moreover, the effect of generally used psychological interventions in pain management was demonstrated. We can conclude that the psychological treatment methods [especially cognitive behavior therapy (CBT)] are effective in reducing the postoperative pain.