on. Surface anesthesia and infiltration anesthesia are collectively called topical anesthesia. The third and last way a dentist can sedate their patient is called peripheral nerve blocks. A peripheral nerve block is an injection of local anesthesia in the vicinity of a peripheral nerve to numb that nerve’s area of innervations.

Virtually every part of the body can be sedated with anesthesia; however there is only a few that are commonly used in clinics around the world. Most of the time this is to ease the patients suffering while undergoing a surgery of some sort.

The history of sedation and anesthesia started with the coca plant. The coca plant was typically used in Peru as a stimulant. Though this affect was used for other, non medical reasons it was also used for the benefit of numbing the part that hurt so that a doctor could do their work without the patient screaming. Cocaine was isolated in eighteen sixty and first used for medical reasons in eighteen eighty-four. Since cocaine was a very addicting substance there was a search for and development of the aminoester local anesthetic procaine in nineteen hundred and four. Since the olden times of medicine and anesthesia there have been several synthetic drugs developed and put into use, notably lidocaine in nineteen forty-three, bupivacaine in nineteen fifty-seven and prilocaine in nineteen fifty-nine.

Some time after the first use of cocaine for topical anesthesia, blocks on the peripheral nerves were labeled. In the early twentieth century, brachial plexus anesthesia by percutaneous injection through axillery and supraclavicular approaches was developed. The search for a better anesthesia still continues to this day. Perhaps instead of burning down the rain forests of the world we will go find the natural, non addictive plant that will be the future of anesthesia.


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