Local anesthetic

Local anesthetic (LA) is a medication that causes reversible absence of pain sensation, although other senses are often affected as well. Also, when it is used on specific nerve pathways (local anesthetic nerve block), paralysis (loss of muscle power) can be achieved as well.

Clinical local anesthetics belong to one of two classes: aminoamide and aminoester local anesthetics. Synthetic local anesthetics are structurally related to cocaine. They differ from cocaine mainly in that they have a very low abuse potential and do not produce hypertension or (with few exceptions) vasoconstriction.

Local anesthetics are used in various techniques of local anesthesia such as:

Medical uses

Acute pain

Acute pain may occur due to trauma, surgery, infection, disruption of blood circulation or many other conditions in which there is tissue injury. In a medical setting it is usually desirable to alleviate pain when its warning function is no longer needed. Besides improving patient comfort, pain therapy can also reduce harmful physiological consequences of untreated pain.

Local Anaesthetic (novel)

Local Anaesthetic (German: Örtlich betäubt ) is a 1969 novel by the German writer Günter Grass. It tells the story of an idealistic high-school teacher who believes society, like a pupil, is learning from experience and reason.

Plot and content

Eberhard Starusch is a 40-year-old teacher of German and history who lives in West Berlin and acts as the tragicomic centre of the novel. In the background one of his students, Phillipp Scherbaum, is planning to set fire to his dog Max on the Kurfurstendamm as a protest against the US involvement in the Vietnam War. Starusch undergoes a long sequence of dental operations in 1967 in a surgery where television is used as a method of distracting patients from the operations and the pain that is involved in them, with the resultant televisual images merging and melding into his consciousness and reflections. Starusch recounts his own meditations upon the political past and the post-war situation in Adenauer's Germany and the inadequacy, from his perspective, of both Left and Right political ideologies and party alignments in that period (with tooth decay acting as a metaphor for wider spiritual and political decay). The book is largely an internal monologue from Starusch's perspective, punctuated only on limited occasions by questions and observations from his dentist.