Surgical Technique in Total Hip Arthroplasty Utilizing the Anterolateral Approach.

The surgical approach is an important element in the quality of total hip replacement. Adequate surgical exposure based upon thorough fundamental knowledge of anatomy facilitates surgery and ensure optimum results in total hip replacement. Several surgical exposure techniques are utilized and have been described in the literature; all stress the importance of visualization of the acetabulum and the proximal femur in affording an atraumatic, expedient entry into the hip joint.

Pain management for joint arthroplasty: preemptive analgesia.

Scheduled preoperative and postoperative analgesia should be offered in a multimodal management model. By a combined drug synergy effect, the central nervous system, afferent pathways, and peripheral wound site are modified collectively. In an ongoing effort to improve perioperative pain management, we retrospectively compared the results of a previously reported pain management protocol with 2 more recent groups of patients managed with modified pain protocols.