As a medical student, you must be competent to manage your patient's pain, there are multiple way to diminish your patient's pain such as the local anaesthetics to inhibit the neural conduction to perception in the spinal cord then pain pathway. You can employ oral medication as well, such as paracetamol in mild to moderate pain level, or you can give NSAIDS either oral or parenteral then if your patient pain is in the severe scale, you then have to order opioid analgesics.
You may observe that anaesthetist has to plan in advance once a patient is due to anaesthetise, what the technique to control the pain after the surgical procedure is done. Due to some side effects from opioid administration, the development of multimodal pain management is usually performed for reaching the early recovery goal as opioid may prolong this recovery.
Epidural analgesia is definitely a great alternative, because you can reduce the overall opioid consumption, your patient is likely to have a lower pain score, so that he/she will be ready to ambulate, have an effective cough so that the perioperative pulmonary complication is avoided. For that surgical patient underwent abdominal procedure especially colectomy, an epidural pain control is an essential part of the enhanced recovery scheme.
In a special case sometimes you may find a patient with the underlying chronic pain symptoms became a surgical patient so that the plan for severe pain control should be kept in mind because you do have to realise the he will be complicated with acute and chronic pain. It is prudent to ask for help or notify an anaesthetist consultant who is keen to take care the chronic pain so that the patient will receive an optimal pain control.
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