Tan X, Ma L, Yuan J, et al. - Researchers examined how daily intravenous lidocaine infusion affects the outcome of the routine treatment of postherpetic neuralgia (PHN). They randomly treated 60 PHN patients with either conventional therapies, such as antiepileptic pills, analgesics, neurotrophic medicines, paravertebral spinal nerve block, and physiotherapy, or daily infusion of lidocaine (4 mg/kg) besides the conventional treatments [lidocaine group]. Findings revealed that the outcome of PHN treatment was enhanced, the amount of analgesic medicine was reduced and the length of hospital stay was shortened with no obvious adverse side effects among patients who were provided daily intravenous lidocaine (4 mg/kg for 5 days).