Anesthesia

Pain relief: methods and history

Anesthesia is the process of eliminating or preventing pain that may occur during surgical operations, injuries, diseases, therapeutic and diagnostic procedures. Methods of pain relief are divided into two main groups: general anesthesia (anesthesia) and local anesthesia (local anesthesia).

The history of pain management goes back more than a thousand years. Since ancient times, people have tried to provide pain relief for injuries and surgical operations, using various methods, such as alcohol, cooling the area of ​​​​the body where surgery was intended, as well as massive bloodletting, believing that a weakened patient reacts less to painful stimuli. However, it was only with the discovery of anesthesia in 1846 that doctors were able to provide complete anesthesia, which became the greatest achievement in the development of surgery.

However, anesthesia in the form in which it existed before was far from safe and had a number of negative aspects. It was precisely because of the danger of anesthesia that various methods of local anesthesia began to be used. Domestic scientists played a major role in their development, and above all A.V. Vishnevsky, who developed the most widely simple methods of local anesthesia.

Depending on the area of ​​the body where anesthesia is needed and the nature of the upcoming operation, local anesthesia can be performed in various ways. For example, during eye surgery, pain relief is achieved by instilling a solution of cocaine or dicaine into the eye. For minor operations in the nasal cavity or nasopharynx, preliminary lubrication of the mucous membranes with the same solutions may be sufficient. Sometimes, to numb a specific area of ​​the body, conduction anesthesia is used, which consists of injecting an anesthetic drug (most often novocaine) directly into the area where the nerve innervating this area passes. This method of pain relief is often used in dentistry during tooth extraction, during operations on the fingers and in a number of other cases.

The most widespread is local infiltration anesthesia, which consists of impregnating the tissues in the area of ​​the upcoming incision with a solution of novocaine through a needle inserted to different depths, causing them to lose sensitivity. This method of pain relief allows even major surgical operations to be performed.

When introduced into the spinal canal, the anesthetic drug acts on the nerves extending from the spinal cord, interrupting the spread of pain impulses along them, resulting in complete anesthesia of all underlying areas of the body. This method of pain relief is called spinal anesthesia.

With the development of medical science and technology, new methods of pain relief have emerged. For example, there are methods of epidural and peridural anesthesia that allow patients to be relieved of pain during childbirth, abdominal surgery, and other cases. In addition, various combinations of anesthesia and local anesthesia are used to ensure maximum comfort and safety for the patient.

Currently, local anesthesia is used less frequently than before, thanks to the development of safe anesthesia methods. However, for low-traumatic and short-term operations, as well as in cases where there are contraindications to anesthesia, local anesthesia is still widely used.

Issues of further improvement of pain relief methods are dealt with by a special medical science - anesthesiology, which is constantly working to create new and more effective methods of pain relief. It is important to note that proper pain management is a prerequisite for the success of any medical procedure and can reduce stress and discomfort in patients.

Pain medicine is a branch of medicine that studies the treatment of pain caused by disturbances in the structural structure or function of organs and tissues, and has been developing since the end of the 19th century. Throughout all previous centuries, the lack of science about killing cells gave rise to the need to wage wars, killing people in the name of achieving political goals, centuries-old bloodshed of peoples and usurpation of states with the subsequent advent of medicine. According to WHO statistics, about 30 million requests for medical help for pain are registered annually. The continuous painful suffering that a person experiences can in some cases be reduced by influencing the nociceptive (pain) as well as antinoceceptive systems of the body. According to experts from the World Health Organization (WHO), pain symptoms are the main cause of lost work time. Estimating costs due to pain as an underlying disease is challenging due to the lack of a global standard due to the difficulty of accurately estimating the prevalence of chronic pain. It has been shown that in clinical terms, 85% of pain accounts for primary chronic pain, phantom pain (6 to 7%) and interstitial pain (about 4–5%) are somewhat less common.