Are there drugs that make regional anaesthesia difficult or dangerous?

So I think the question you're asking is, are there medications that the patient may be taking that would make it awkward, difficult or dangerous for us to give a regional anaesthetic? And the answer is yes, there are, but there are pretty few and far between. For the most part, for most regional anaesthetic techniques, particularly the ones where we stick a needle in your back, and that's a sort of epidural and spinal injections, we want to make sure that the patient's blood clotting is normal. Now some patients are on medications that affect their blood clotting. I won't go through the list of names of those drugs at the moment but when you are screened before the operation, your pre-operative assessment, we will very carefully ask you whether you're on any of these drugs and if you are on certain of those drugs that may make it a little bit more dangerous for you to have a spinal or an epidural anaesthetic. We will advise you of this, we will talk to you about the risk, we'll make sure that you're fully informed about any additional risks before asking you to agree to undergo a general anaesthetic, a regional anaesthetic or a local anaesthetic. So the answer is there are some drugs that we have to be careful with but only a very small number of patients are actually taking those drugs.