Abstract
Postoperative pain management is moving away from epidural analgesia towards increasing use of IV-PCA in Japan to avoid the risks associated with the former IV-PCA, in which a narcotic is continuously injected. It was originally devised to prevent an excessive dose of a single bolus injection of a long-acting analgesic like morphine. Using IV-PCA, the dose of narcotic can be individually adjusted to be optimal for each patient. IV-PCA is, therefore, expected to become ever more widely used in the future. In this article, I review the fundamental principles of IV-PCA, as well as how to employ it with frequently-used opioids, and give examples of actual cases of opioid administration.
