Emerging trends and new approaches to acute pain management.

New approaches to the management of acute perioperative pain have focused on ways to improve the risk/benefit profile of various analgesics, enhance the consistency of pain control, address interpatient differences in responses to pain and treatments, and avoid periods of ineffective pain relief (analgesic gaps). Although intravenous patient-controlled analgesia has been the "gold standard" for acute pain management, there are now more analgesic options and compelling data to support combinations of analgesics or multimodal therapy, timing of analgesic interventions, and the use of newer drug delivery systems. Maximizing pain control with preemptive analgesia and multimodal therapy, and the availability of transdermal fentanyl by iontophoresis and extended-release epidural morphine have expanded the armamentarium of effective options for perioperative pain control. This article explores emerging trends in acute pain therapy, and discusses their implications for improving patient care.