Too OFTEN, before she even meets the anaesthetist, the woman in labour has already experienced the greatest part of the pain associated with having her baby. She then receives an epidural block, a saddle block, or other form of anaesthetic for the final half hour or so of labour. The first stage is often a trying, unpleasant, and painful episode. In the past this has been dealt with relatively ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Lidocaine could provide many advantages in continuous regional anesthesia techniques, including faster onset, greater titratability, and lower cost than long-acting local anesthetics. This prospective, randomized, double-blinded, pilot study is therefore intended to compare lidocaine to ropivacaine in bilateral continuous paravertebral blocks using a multimodal approac...

Thoracic parvartebral blockade is a century old technique used for intra-operative and peri-operative pain control as well as acute and chronic non-operative pain. Although not used for many decades, this block has enjoyed a resurgence of interest over the past twenty years. Clinical benefits include the following: thoracic paravertebral blockade may be unilateral or bilateral, motor blackade i...

a t i AIN AFTER thoracotomy and thoracoscopic surgery can cause patient distress, impair respiratory function, and deay recovery.1,2 Epidural analgesia is generally regarded as a tandard of care for patients undergoing thoracotomy,1,3 but pidural block is probably not warranted for less invasive horacic surgery. Sometimes, however, the extent of surgery is nclear until histopathology results ar...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The technique of securing the epidural catheter has a major bearing on the efficacy of epidural analgesia. Specific fixator devices, for e.g., Lockit epidural catheter clamp, which successfully prevents catheter migration, are available. The possibility of catheter snapping and surgical retrieval has been reported with tunneling of catheters. These techniques have not been c...

Video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS) is emerging as the standard surgical procedure for both minor and major oncological lung surgery. Thoracic epidural analgesia (TEA) and paravertebral block (PVB) are established analgesic golden standards for open surgery such as thoracotomy; however, there is no gold standard for regional analgesia for VATS. This systematic review aimed to assess differen...

Clinical observation suggests that the number of serious epidural catheter-associated infections have increased recently in children. This increase is likely attributed to an increase in reporting and in frequency of epidural analgesia usage. Estimates of infection rates are difficult to determine primarily because of insufficient study of large pediatric populations. In this retrospective stud...