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Spotlight: Jacob Hutchins, MD, takes a precise approach to pain management
Jacob Hutchins, MD, wants to take your pain away.
Hutchins, an anesthesiologist and the director of the University of Minnesota Health Perioperative and Interventional Pain Service, uses cutting edge ultrasound techniques to guide anesthetics to specific locations within a patient’s body.
Hutchins has worked for two years at the University of Minnesota Medical Center.
Why are you passionate about your position?
I’m able to decrease the pain and suffering that patients feel after surgery. There are different techniques and approaches to each type of surgery and we are on the cutting edge of regional anesthesia pain control so we can offer the best therapy currently available to our patients.
What makes your approach to anesthesiology unique? Why is this approach advantageous for patients?
Regional anesthesia allows us to specifically anesthetize a particular area of the body, which helps to minimize the overall anesthesia you need but also provide excellent site-directed pain control for days after surgery.
To do this, we utilize advanced ultrasound-guided techniques which allow us to watch the needle as it is directed towards the nerve(s) or the area where we are planning to provide pain relief. This allows for a site-specific effect, rather than administering opioid medications, which not only affect the site of pain –but the entire body as well. We stress a multi-modal approach to attack the pain from all pain pathways rather than just the opioid pathway. In this way we optimize pain control and minimize side effects.