[Local and regional anesthesia of the upper limb in emergency hand surgery].

The very conditions of the emergency led the authors to define the indications for the various modalities of local and regional anaesthesia: intravenous regional anaesthesia, nerve trunk blocks, plexus blocks, interdigital block and local infiltration. The parallel development of anaesthetic drugs with variable systemic toxicity and a duration of action inversely proportional to the toxicity now allows precise adaptation of the anaesthesia to the type of lesion, the patient's general condition, the practical conditions of the emergency and the surgical technique selected, provided the anaesthetist is fully aware of the traps to be avoided, which can only be based on a long practice of local and regional anaesthesia in elective surgery.