“What are the disadvantages of local anesthesia?”

It is somewhat of a complicated question. The term "local anesthesia" is often used for smaller procedures that can be numbed by the injection of local anesthetics only, without any additional sedatives. The advantage of this approach is that the patient can drive home from the office or hospital after the procedure. The disadvantage of local anesthesia only is that it may be very uncomfortable during the procedure. A nerve block uses local anesthetics that are injected around a nerve. This is more involved and usually involves additional sedatives. In general, the anesthesiologist will discuss the options with the patient. In my practice, it is usually a group decision between patient anesthesiologist and surgeon. All three parties want safe and effective operating conditions, so it’s usually not difficult to come up with a solution. If that solution doesn’t work then one can always usually employ general anesthesia so they can tolerate the procedure.
I hope this helps, now back to my precious day off!

Jeffrey C. Astbury, MD, FASA, FACC, FASE, MSBE, MSEE

This depends on what you’re defining as local anesthesia. In our world, the term “local” when used as an anesthetic type means that the surgeon injects local anesthetic at the surgical site and we are not involved.

Having a local anesthetic for the surgery itself under the practice of anesthesia we call ‘regional anesthesia” and this typically includes sedation for both the nerve block and the surgical procedure.

Not possible to answer this without knowing what the planned surgery might be. In general, local anesthesia is best for making small superficial areas numb. Local anesthetics can cause problems if they are inadvertently injected into blood vessels or directly into nerves.

Not too many, If you want local anesthesia for a procedure, you may get some sedation through a perfusion in a vein.