Anesthesia for Minor Procedures

Unlike adults, children often don't tolerate even minor procedures. You can't explain to a toddler that she has to be still during an MRI despite the loud noises it makes. You can't even get close to a teenager with a scalpel to do a procedure that an adult would tolerate with local anesthesia. So anesthesiologists are often involved in cases where perhaps the anesthetic is as big as the procedure itself. I've done a couple general anesthetics for chest tube placement, bone marrow biopsies, CT and MRI scans. The craziest request we've gotten, however, was a general anesthetic for IV placement in a child who refused to have an IV. There, the risks of a mask anesthetic were probably higher than that of the IV placement.