Search

I believe that dentists have made important contributions to anesthesiology and patient care. Medical anesthesiology is now being required to provide more same-day or ambulatory care. Where it was once good sport to criticize dentists providing brief anesthesia services for their patients, it has now become appropriate for physician anesthesiologists to use shorter-acting agents, improved physiologic monitoring, reversal agents, and early discharge as part of their care of patients. Anecdotes are informative and often provide us with nostalgic recognition and a smile. Ask yourself how you would have responded to the needs of your patients if you were practicing 40 or more yrs ago. We owe a major debt of gratitude to our gallant forebearers and an acknowledgement saying "Well done," and "God bless."

One century after the clinical introduction of cocaine, local anesthesia remains the most important method of pain control in dentistry. Many local anesthetics have been marketed since 1884, and it is likely that attempts to produce drugs that enhance anesthetic efficacy, reduce systemic and local toxicity, and increase nociceptive selectivity, will continue. In addition, new methods of drug administration have been and will be developed to achieve these goals. Of fundamental importance to such improvements are investigations into the pharmacology of drugs with local anesthetic activity and anatomical and physiologic studies pertaining to the reasons why local anesthetics sometimes fail to achieve desired results. This paper reviews recent advances in our understanding of these drugs and their clinical use.