What is the difference between Anesthesia and Analgesia?

Anesthesia can be defined as a state whereby someone lost his or her sensation or awareness temporarily, which is brought about for medical purposes. This may include paralysis (relaxation of muscles), unconsciousness, amnesia (memory loss), and analgesia (prevention of or relief from pain). A patient is said to be anesthetized when he or she is under the influence of anesthetic drugs. Analgesia, on the other hand, is the drug or medication given to someone suffering the pain to relief or alleviate the pain.

Anesthesia is usually used when it comes to the surgical aspect of treatment. The effect of analgesia on the body is not such that it removes one’s emotion or sensation of physical awareness totally from the body. It only dives into the body to render the mechanisms that cause pain in the body inactive. Even the pain of wounds or inflammation would not be felt. Anesthesia, on the contrary, especially the total anesthesia, would render the whole body system inactive.

Those who are not in the medical field may not have heard of the analgesia often. Analgesia and anesthesia usually accompany each other. Analgesia is known to be a lack of pain. When people go through this, they do not feel anything. Anaesthesia, on the other hand, is known to cause lack of sensation. This is usually needed by people when they have to undergo surgery.

There was a time in history wherein people underwent surgery without anesthesia, and the pain proved to be so much to a lot of people that they have fainted or died not because of the operation but because of the sensations that they are experiencing. Anaesthesiologists need to be very careful with what they are doing. Too much or too little anesthesia may cause issues with the patients.