Balanced Anesthesia

Balanced anesthesia, also known as multimodal anesthesia, is a technique used to induce and maintain anesthesia in patients undergoing surgery or certain medical procedures by combining multiple anesthetic agents and other drugs and techniques to selectively target different aspects of the central nervous system, allowing a tailored anesthetic approach based on the individual patient and the specific procedure. Before selecting an anesthetic approach, the anesthesiologist, anaesthetist or veterinarian evaluates patient factors including major organ function, general condition and compensatory capacity, the ability to function despite stressors, and then combines appropriate agents at carefully calibrated levels. The concept of balanced anesthesia was first introduced by John Silas Lundy in 1926 and has since become the predominant method of anesthesia in modern medical practice.