Difference Between Anesthesia and Analgesia

Anesthesia is defined as that product wherein it would remove from the body that sensation or feeling.  Analgesia is that medication that would alleviate or ease the pain that eh person is already suffering from.  The best example to distinguish between the two is a headache, an analgesic is offered for those persons to deal with the pain.  Meanwhile, surgical procedures are the fields where the anesthesia is usually used.  When it comes to the effect, analgesia will not generally remove from the body that sensation and emotion of physical awareness.  It only works inside the body to fight off the mechanisms that create the pain.  These would include inflammations and wounds.  On the other side, the anesthesia would generally hamper the entire body, especially if the patient is given this total general anesthesia.

The analgesic drugs work in the peripheral and central nervous systems of the human body.  Examples of such drugs that are considered to be analgesic are paracetamol, anti-inflammatory drugs, salicylates, and morphine and opium.  The major classes of the drugs include paracetamols,COX 2 Inhibitors, Opiates, Flupirtine, and others.  Anesthesia, meanwhile, has only three major classifications and this is the local anesthesia, the regional anesthesia and the general anesthesia.  Each group of anesthetics focuses mostly on removing the sensation and feeling from the one part of the body or perhaps the entire human body, depending on the extent of the surgery.

There are also a variety of ways to ingest the anesthetic into the human body.  You have the choices medical gases, injection needles and medical breathing vapors.  Meanwhile, the analgesic comes mostly on the form of pills, which can be taken orally, although, in extreme cases of pain the patient is injected with the medication.  The anesthesia should only be injected or taken by a licensed physician while the analgesia can simply be swallowed in taken in a pill.

The effects of the medication that is being taken would also differ from one another.  The anesthesia is a medication that can mean the elimination of feeling or emotion on a particular part of the body.  This would, of course, depend on the type of anesthesia that is being applied.  If you are taking analgesic, then most likely your entire body will feel the effects of the medication.  Thus, if you want to rid of pain in the head, it may also remove the pain you feel in your feet or other body parts.  In terms of intake, the analgesic is usually taken after anesthesia has been ingested and already removed from the body.  This would usually occur during occasions after major surgeries, and the body would feel the pain of the wound after the anesthesia has worn off.

Summary

1. Anesthesia is removing feeling from the body while analgesia will typically remove or decrease the level of pain.
2. Anesthesia works in most of the human body systems while analgesia works with the peripheral and central nervous system.
3. Analgesia is taken only after the effects of anesthesia have worn off.
4. Anesthesia should be properly administered by a licensed physician while analgesia can easily be taken orally.