Using TAP Blocks for a Better Tummy Tuck Experience (Ep 29)

Highlights:

• What is the tummy tuck procedure and why is it so painful? (00:40)
• What is a TAP block and why is it done? (02:20)
• Benefits of receiving a TAP block with abdominal surgery (03:25)
• When patients receive a TAP block (05:47)

Links:

Dr. Jason Hall, MD

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Transcript

Dr. Hall: Welcome to The Trillium Show, where we help you make the changes you want to see in your body, in your mind, and in your life. I’m your host, Dr. Jason Hall.

Abdominoplasty surgery is typically one of the most painful plastic surgery procedures that a woman can undergo, but there is a procedure that can help significantly reduce the discomfort a woman feels after an abdominoplasty. We’re going to talk about what that procedure is and how I’ve added it to every body contouring case that I do and made the recovery so much better. Typically, abdominoplasty surgery involves something called rectus muscle plication, which is where we take the loosened rectus muscles, which are your six-pack muscles, and we sew those muscles back together in the middle to kind of recreate the six-pack that is stretched out with pregnancy or significant weight changes. Now, any surgery involving muscle—and you know this if you’ve ever had any orthopedic procedures done before—any surgery involving muscle hurts. Now, there is a procedure that we can do that we can significantly decrease the amount of discomfort that a woman feels after an abdominoplasty surgery; that procedure is something called a TAP block.

Now, this procedure is an anesthetic procedure. It is a—it is not a surgical procedure, it is an anesthesia procedure where we use an ultrasound and actually put numbing medicine around the nerves in your sides that kind of come out of your spinal cord from your back around to your rectus muscles and give those muscles and the skin over them sensation. And by injecting some local anesthetic before your surgery even starts, we can significantly minimize the amount of discomfort that you feel during surgery, and by doing that, essentially tricking your body into thinking that you haven’t had surgery, or at least haven’t had the kind of procedure that you’ve had, we can significantly reduce the amount of postoperative pain and discomfort that you have.

So, what is a TAP block and how is it done? I started doing TAP blocks and using these in my abdominoplasty surgeries about a year-and-a-half ago—it’s like mid-2022 right now as we’re recording this—and the beginning of 2021, I started using TAP blocks with every abdominoplasty surgery that I performed. I have an ultrasound that I used here in the office and in surgery. And using that ultrasound, I can locate the area where these nerves come out of your back and travel around the side to the front of your abdomen, and specifically inject some local anesthesia, watching it the whole time, around those nerves. And what that does is it deadens the muscles and skin in the front of your abdomen. By doing that, we block painful feelings from going back into your spine.

How this is effective is that it minimizes the amount of pain that you experience during surgery. Our anesthesia colleagues noticed that after I started doing these, that the amount of narcotic,