General Anesthesia Techniques

General anesthesia techniques and the drug-delivery methods and adjuncts used to induce and maintain a reversible, whole-body unconscious state for surgery, as distinct from a regional block, a local numbing technique or a sedation-only state that leaves the patient responsive. This includes general anaesthesia and general anesthesia themselves, balanced anesthesia, which combines several drug classes to achieve unconsciousness, analgesia and muscle relaxation together, total intravenous anesthesia, which maintains general anesthesia using only intravenous agents rather than inhaled gas, coinduction, the practice of combining two induction agents, membrane-mediated anesthesia, and hypnosurgery, a historical technique that used hypnotic trance rather than a drug to achieve a surgical anesthetic state. A technique whose defining agent is a nerve block, a topically or locally applied numbing drug, or a sedative given without inducing full unconsciousness is grouped elsewhere.