What is regional anaesthesia?

We doctors use the term regional anesthesia and that's a little bit confusing because patients usually understand that as local anesthesia it's essentially making a region a part of your body go numb using local anesthetics allowing you to do the operation but not having to give you a general anesthetic. Now those of us like me who are passionate regional anesthetists can find very very very many good reasons for performing procedures under regional anaesthesia rather than general anaesthesia and those advantages start to increase as patients get older and start to increase as patients develop other conditions like high blood pressure, heart disease and lung disease. If you're young, if you're fit, there's probably little difference on your outcome but if you have medical problems or you are of greater age or very large and doing something under regional anaesthesia can have significant benefits in your recovery and in your outcome from the procedure.