No opinion one way or the other regarding this specific case, however I'd like to note that both general and local anesthetics can have serious side-effects. There were even relevant horror-stories in HN comments.

A specific issue is that anesthesiologists are not necessarily available for all medical procedures. Perhaps it's better to err on the side of pain if the gynecologist is alone?

EDIT: "After simple dental surgery, a man lost his ability to form new memories" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24566568

The vast majority of gynecology procedures are scheduled - the fact that they don’t intend to do pain management and therefore don’t plan so that anesthetists are available is an effect of not doing pain management, not a cause.

What about cost, though?

Basically orthogonal to your argument.

My intended point was that raising the cost of a procedure makes it less accessible.

Maybe if we could just do economies of scale for insurance, maybe including every person, it could be much cheaper. Also, no shady lobbying everywhere anymore.

Cost is not a consideration until after they have decided that pain management would be valuable, so it can't be relevant in a scenario where it wasn't considered in the first place.

One thing that has always baffled me is why nitrous oxide isn't commonly used in these sort of situations.

There are formulations available (mixed 50/50 with oxygen) that don't require an anesthesiologist.

> After simple dental surgery,

Odd the article entirely leaves out what tooth was being worked on. The upper back molars are very close to the brain, and Wisdom teeth are connected to the central nervous system, so it is not really a head-scratcher brain damage could occur if the ophthalmologist slipped, or if the patient was hyper-reactive to the anesthesia and jerked while the doctor was working. But in both cases, the doctor should have noticed.

> ophthalmologist

isn't that eye-doctor?

and whatever the case, the risks should be told to the patient. informed consent after all.

statistically pain management is very safe, and medical procedures cause a lot of stress and discomfort, and it'd be good to manage that especially for patients who are not used to those procedures. (eg. kids, or anyone who gets a chronic disease diagnosis and and has to go through various scopies like colonoscopy).

> isn't that eye-doctor?

ROFL orthodontist isn't even close ><

The old joke about the dentist saying this "may hurt a little" suddenly realising the patient is holding the dentist's testicles. "This may hurt a little" says the patient.

You'll feel some "slight pressure and moderate discomfort" was how I heard an induction described. The party experiencing the procedure described it as, paraphrasing, "the most excruciating pain I've ever felt," but with many more words I won't reproduce here.

I wonder what was the procedure that causes such pain

Inducing labor. In this particular case it was the Foley balloon, but my understanding is every step of the process is at best painful.

Thanks, I hadn't heard about the Foley balloon.

I have heard that people with chronic pain also get this kind of reaction often.

I used to have fairly severe chronic pain (facial neuralgia) that was fixed with surgery and it's exactly like the original poster described.