Nerve Block - Advantages

Advantages

The use of peripheral nerve blockade offers several advantages when compared to general anesthesia or local anesthesia:

  • The patient can remain awake and breathing on his/her own, thus protecting himself/herself from aspiration of stomach contents into the lungs. By avoiding general anesthesia, patients with adverse reactions to general anesthetics can be successfully treated. Similarly, patients who experience nuisance side effects from general anesthesia such as nausea and vomiting or excessive sleepiness can minimize these symptoms.
  • There is no need to perform a tracheal intubation, with its attendant complications.
  • The sympathetic nerves to the operative limb are anesthetized, leading to vasodilation. This improves blood flow to the affected limb and makes microvascular surgical procedures technically easier.
  • The limb can remain numb for several hours after surgery, providing excellent pain relief.
  • Deep and superficial structures of the limb are similarly anesthetized, allowing extensive surgical exploration and correction to occur. This is in contrast to locally injected local anesthetics, which tend only to numb superficial structures in the immediate vicinity of the injection.

Read more about this topic:  Nerve Block

Famous quotes containing the word advantages:

    “[T]here is no Part of the World where Servants have those Privileges and Advantages as in England: They have no where else such plentiful Diet, large Wages, or indulgent Liberty: There is no place wherein they labour less, and yet where they are so little respectful, more wasteful, more negligent, or where they so frequently change their Masters.”
    —Richard Steele (1672–1729)

    “... there are no chains so galling as the chains of ignorance—no fetters so binding as those that bind the soul, and exclude it from the vast field of useful and scientific knowledge. O, had I received the advantages of early education, my ideas would, ere now, have expanded far and wide; but, alas! I possess nothing but moral capability—no teachings but the teachings of the Holy Spirit.”
    —Maria Stewart (1803–1879)

    “Men hear gladly of the power of blood or race. Every body likes to know that his advantages cannot be attributed to air, soil, sea, or to local wealth, as mines and quarries, nor to laws and traditions, nor to fortune, but to superior brain, as it makes the praise more personal to him.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)