Surgery and Pain While on Suboxone: How Pain Is Treated Safely

Surgery, an injury or a dental procedure can be worrying when you take buprenorphine. Can your pain be treated? Yes. Planning ahead makes it much easier.

Current guidance: usually keep taking buprenorphine

Stopping buprenorphine before surgery used to be common. Today, most guidance recommends continuing it, because stopping risks withdrawal, relapse and overdose. Splitting the daily dose into two or three doses can improve its pain relief, but only change how you take it when your provider tells you to.

Other pain relief

• Acetaminophen and anti-inflammatory medicines such as ibuprofen, when safe for you
• Nerve blocks and local or regional anesthesia
• Ice, elevation and physical therapy
• In the hospital, additional opioid pain medicine may be used under close monitoring, at higher doses than usual because buprenorphine blocks part of their effect

Before any procedure

• Tell your surgeon, anesthesiologist and dentist you take buprenorphine
• Ask them to talk with your addiction medicine provider
• Plan who will hold and dispense any extra pain medicine after you go home

Help at Hope Addiction Medicine

Our team combines medication with counseling and behavioral therapies, in person at our West Ashley office in Charleston and by telehealth when appropriate. New patients are often able to be scheduled within a week of requesting an appointment. Request an appointment or call our office.

This article is general health information and does not replace advice from your own provider. Never start, stop or change a medication without talking with your prescriber. If someone may be overdosing, call 911 and give naloxone if you have it.