RESEARCH ARTICLE
Anesthesia for Shoulder Surgery: A Review of the Interscalene Block and a Discussion of Regional vs. General Anesthesia
Ahmed Ghaleb*, 1, Joshua D. Dilley2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2012Volume: 6
First Page: 18
Last Page: 28
Publisher ID: TOATJ-6-18
DOI: 10.2174/1874321801206010018
Article History:
Received Date: 18/06/2012Revision Received Date: 04/10/2012
Acceptance Date: 06/10/2012
Electronic publication date: 16/11/2012
Collection year: 2012
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
A review of the literature regarding anesthesia for shoulder surgery was performed. Current anesthetic tech-niques available include regional, general, or a combination of regional and general. We discuss each of these techniques, with an emphasis on regional (specifically interscalene block), in detail. Current evidence supports both regional and gen-eral anesthesia to be safe and efficient techniques. The interscalene block is considered by most to provide the best surgi-cal anesthesia and is the most commonly performed block for shoulder surgery. This paper aims to review the perform-ance of the interscalene block and to discuss alternative choices for shoulder surgery, namely general anesthesia and a combined general/regional technique. We also aim to provide considerations to aid in the performance of a safely admin-istered anesthetic.