Nerve blocks for dental procedures – is there anything new?

Nerve blocks have been used in equine dentistry for many years and local anaesthetic agents were discovered in the nineteenth century [1]. However, the application of regional analgesia to make intrusive painful and noxious dental procedures tolerable to the hapless equine is a new concept to many people. Despite the fact that some horses will tolerate some oral procedures with minimal restraint and analgesia, this does not make it justifiable to subject horses to such potentially painful or frightening procedures without adequate analgesia. This would be the case when undertaking invasive or painful veterinary procedures elsewhere on the horse’s body and some knowledge of analgesic techniques applicable to the dentition is a prerequisite to planning any such intrusions within the oral cavity of the horse or donkey [2–4] ...