The Issues About General Anesthesia Sedation versus Local Anesthesia

Falls in Argentina photo by Dr. Robert Yoho

 We have many times emphasized in our information on our website and to our patients that we think that the light sedation that we use, which does leave the patient without any memory of the procedure, is by far the best way to go. Confusion arises with this because using pure local anesthetic the way a lot of people do, including the rapid facelift and the weekend facelift surgeons, often leaves the patients terrified and there is some pain involved. Our anesthetic, on the other hand, leaves the perception of general anesthetic, with no memory of the procedure in 99.9% of the cases, and we feel the risks are minimized and the discomfort is also minimized. Very little post anesthetic reaction occurs, with the chance of nausea, vomiting, and other bad feelings from the anesthetic being minimized.

General anesthetic is used by many well-meaning and well-trained surgeons who just haven’t found out just how to achieve good sedation without using all those heavy drugs. General sedation also requires an anesthesiologist to put the tube in the throat, and the attendant risks of general anesthesia. These surgeons generally have been trained in a hospital and are used to doing things just one way. They don’t understand and haven’t taken responsibility for the anesthesia care of their patients.

Dr. Yoho, on the other hand, as a Board-certified emergency room physician, is confident about his ability to manage patients who are sedated and his ability to give them a comfortable experience. This has been well-established after tens of thousands of cases of experience. Dr. Yoho gets as many cases as a lot of anesthesiologists get each year. We do use local anesthetic if the patient requests it as a sole or single agent for the pain relief, but we don’t usually recommend it. We recommend at least a touch of relaxation medicine and more likely our version of the single medication sedation technique that we advocate, have perfected, and have published articles in medical literature about. You can read more at DrYoho.com. You can read Dr. Yoho’s original article about this technique, which has been adopted by many surgeons across the country.

An additional advantage of your anesthesia at Dr. Yoho’s office is that you save money. Not only are the medications much less expensive than medications used for general anesthetic, but the extra expense of an anesthesiologist is avoided. Instead of an anesthesiologist, we have a fully licensed physician’s assistant who is competent to administer this medication and has been doing it for many thousands of cases. Dr. Yoho is also involved and we watch you very carefully with the standard monitoring technique that’s used in a surgery. The very cheapest of these medications, which are the Morphine/Demerol class drugs, are not used, and our technique does cost us a little more than this, but it’s much cheaper to make you comfortable using these modern medications than it is to have the anesthesiologist use a gas anesthesia or the many different drugs that are typically administered in general anesthesia.