Volume 69 Numbers 1 & 2 January/March 2002	back to contents

Advances in Labor Analgesia	38-44
Yaakov Beilin, M.D.

Associate Professor of Anesthesiology, and of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY.

Address correspondence to Yaakov Beilin, M.D., Department of Anesthesiology, Box 1010, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, One East 100th Street, New York, NY 10029-6574.

ABSTRACT

Approximately two-thirds of all women in the United States receive analgesia for labor and delivery. The ideal labor analgesic technique would confer complete pain relief without side effects to either the mother or the neonate. The analgesic technique would not cause any lower extremity motor blockade nor interfere with the progress or course of labor and would be sufficiently flexible to produce anesthesia for forceps or cesarean deliveries. Modern obstetric analgesia techniques and medications come close to achieving these goals. The following article will review current labor analgesia techniques and medications used during labor and delivery.

KEYWORDS

Advances, analgesia, epidural, combined spinal-epidural, local anesthetics.

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