Does regional anaesthesia cause low blood pressure?

Now, a lot of people ask whether the techniques we use cause decreases in blood pressure, what we doctors would confusingly call hypotension, low blood pressure. If I'm making your arm go numb or your leg go numb, that's not going to happen. It only really happens if we pop a needle at the base of your spine to perform a spinal anaesthetic or an epidural anaesthetic. only really happens if we need to numb really quite a lot of your body. Because we know it can happen, we measure your blood pressure very carefully, we measure it frequently so that if it does go down we can take quick and effective action. Because we know it can go down, we establish a drip in your arm, a little plastic tube that goes into a vein which allows us to give you fluids and medications which immediately counteract that low blood pressure, restoring your blood pressure to normal. So we know when it happens, we know to whom it happens, we know how to treat it and we monitor you very very carefully. Do not think for a moment that the only cause of low blood pressure is using a regional anaesthetic, because blood pressure also goes down during general anaesthetic in exactly the same way to almost exactly the same extent and exactly the same precautions and treatments are put in place for general anaesthesia. We anaesthetists do low blood pressure for a living and you should not be concerned because we know when it happens and we know what to do about it.