“Do you use local anesthesia for wrist surgery?”
I will have wrist joint surgery. Do you use local anesthesia for wrist surgery?
2 Answers
A standard of care would be a regional anesthesia with either general or monitored anesthesia care. Regional could be Supraclavicular, infraclavicular or axillary nerve blocks.
I do use local anesthesia for wrist surgery. Typically I use a technique call a Bier Block where I inflate a blood pressure cuff very tightly on the arm and then I inject local anesthesia via a catheter in the operative side. The cuff allows the local anesthesia to sit in the wrist and make it numb. I also provide sedation to the patient during the procedure so they are not awake during surgery.
