Bloom Still on the Rose for Shoulder Pain Pumps in 2002

Miami, FLThe shoulder pain pump has become vilified in the medical community, primarily due to misinformation regarding its proper use in proximity to the shoulder. Surgeons have been known to place the tip of a pain pump catheter directly into the joint in an effort to maximize pain relief and to speed healing, without realizing the dangers and risk to shoulder cartilage.

Various lawsuits are claiming that manufacturers never shared with doctors the potential risks of doing permanent, irreversible damage to shoulder cartilage resulting from a toxic reaction to commonly prescribed pain medication fed directly to the shoulder joint. It is also alleged that doctors were not informed that US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for shoulder pain pumps was restricted to soft tissue around the shoulder, and not the shoulder joint itself.

Doctors thought it was safe—and no one appeared to be telling them otherwise until patients began appearing with irreversible postarthroscopic glenohumeral chondrolysis (PAGCL), a breakdown of precious joint cartilage that does not regenerate. PAGCL patients—many of them heartbreakingly young—have been faced with the expensive prospect of shoulder replacement surgery.

The alternative is a lifetime of pain and immobility from simple shoulder surgery.

It was a very different feeling in July of 2002, when WPLG TV Miami ran a story on their 5:30 pm newscast about a revolutionary new way to manage pain: the pain pump. Two days before the 4th of July celebrations that year, ABC 10 Miami told the story, today posted on YouTube, of two patients facing knee surgery with the use—then relatively new—of a pain pump.

It should be noted that these two procedures involved the knee. However, the surgeon overseeing the arthroscopic surgery of the female patient referred to the shoulder in on-camera comments describing the then-new pain pump technology.

"It's actually a computerized device that we can pre-set and program to place an analgesic medication within a catheter system that will be administered via a computer to the operative site such as a shoulder joint or a knee joint…"

Such comments appear to back allegations that doctors were assured by pain pump manufacturers that such devices were safe to use directly to the shoulder joint—even though the FDA had never approved the shoulder pain pump for that indication and repeatedly turned down applications by shoulder pain pump manufactures to approve an expanded use beyond soft tissue surrounding the shoulder.

It wasn't until four years after the WPLG story came out that a study published by the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons suggested that shoulder pain pump use could be associated with PAGCL. Of 152 arthroscopic shoulder repair surgery patients, 12 had suffered a breakdown of shoulder cartridge following surgery. All 12 had been prescribed shoulder pain pumps directly to the shoulder joint post surgery.