Anesthesia: A Yale Medicine Overview

Anesthetic medications are designed to disrupt or block pain signals, which prevent or reduce the sensation of pain. Different approaches include local, regional, and intravenous, or IV, sedation.

Local anesthesia is something most people have experienced at the doctor’s or dentist’s office for minor procedures and involves numbing a small area. Regional anesthesia, also known as monitored anesthesia care, is a very deep sedation and blocks large nerves or nerve bundles and can be injected near peripheral nerves or closer to the spinal cord—for an epidural, for example.

IV sedation is often used for procedures like colonoscopies. General anesthesia means a patient is fully unconscious and does not experience pain.

“What we are doing is creating a space around both the brain and the body, which is characterized by unconsciousness, lack of pain, amnesia, and paralysis with the maintenance of normal bodily functions,” says Paragi Rana, MD, a Yale Medicine anesthesiologist and division chief of inpatient pain at Yale New Haven Health. “And that physiologic function is monitored and maintained by your anesthesiologist.”

Anesthesiologists are also key providers in the management of chronic pain. “We are moving toward what we call a perioperative home, where patients are not under the care of an anesthesiologist only during the immediate preoperative and intraoperative period, but really becoming involved in care three to six months prior to a patient coming to surgery, during surgery, and then their postoperative care afterwards,” Dr. Rana says. “And chronic pain medicine provides an ability to attenuate risk factors for the development of chronic pain after surgery, and facilitate the development of comprehensive pain plans.”

Yale Medicine experts talk more about advances in anesthesia in the video above.