Intravenous Dexamethasone as an Analgesic: A Literature Review.

The management of pain in surgical patients has shifted in recent years from a technique grounded in opioid administration, to a multimodal method that uses the analgesic properties of many drugs to minimize required narcotics. Multimodal analgesia has demonstrated a benefit in patient outcomes following a surgical procedure. Also of consideration is the fact that multimodal analgesia allows for less opioid to be administered to achieve acceptable pain scores, in turn reducing a patient's exposure to a potentially addicting substance.