How Painful Is Shoulder Replacement Surgery?

How painful is surgery? Surprisingly, it’s not nearly as bad as most patients think it will be.

When we pull our patients after surgery, the vast majority, 95% of them, say that it’s not nearly as bad as they thought it would be. We use a multimodal pain approach and very small incisions. We use muscle-sparing techniques and bone-sparing techniques. Because of the technologies that we have and use now, we can perform the procedure in less than 30 minutes.

Because of the technology we use now and our rehab techniques, we accelerate our rehabilitation by letting people move their arms quickly. Doing all these things together minimizes the post-operative pains, so when we see patients back in the office ten days after surgery, the vast majority of them tell us that their shoulder feels better than it did before the surgery.

And the vast majority of our patients only take narcotics, the strong pain pills, for maybe three to four days after the operation. I don’t think it’s nearly as bad as people picture in their minds, or at least that’s what our patients tell us.