On April 7, the Spanish Agency of Medicine authorized a new drug that has already arrived in our country, it is an analgesic gas to relieve pain in short medical interventions and that can be applied to both children and adults.
In just three minutes, this medicine allows you to end the physical pain that can be caused by stitches, emergency cures, lumbar punctures, reduction of simple fractures and even while waiting for epidural anesthesia or if it should be dispensed with .
Its application is done through a mask adapted to the patient, if used at the dentist, it would be a nasal or nasobuccal mask, in other cases, a facial mask appropriate to the user's morphology. After three minutes of the administration of the analgesic gas, the diagnostic or therapeutic intervention can be carried out without fear of causing pain, with a maximum duration of one hour. Once the inhalation is stopped, the initial state is recovered almost immediately. The Pharmaceutical Air Liquide Medicinal laboratory has patented Kalinox, an odorless and colorless mixture of 50% oxygen and nitrogen protoxide, at a pressure of 170bar. This acts on the pain transmission pathways and the patient remains conscious at all times after administration, which can also have their cooperation, and both the absorption and elimination of this analgesic gas, are pulmonary and due at its low solubility in blood and tissues, it is done very quickly.
By provoking an anxiolytic effect, it reduces the anxiety caused by medical performance, which is also very useful in children, who are more vulnerable to the psychoneurological effects caused by pain before medical intervention. It also has an amnesic effect that makes the patient not remember suffering pain.
This type of medicine has been used for many years in Australia, France and the United Kingdom, demonstrating its efficacy and safety, in approximately 80% of painful procedures.
A first work on the effectiveness of Kalinox in Spain has already been published and was presented at the last Congress of the National Association of Pediatrics held in Valencia, where analgesic gas was tested in 30 children of about 6 years of age with favorable results . Meanwhile, in the journal Pediatrics, they published a paper in which they carried out the study in 31 centers in which more than a thousand children intervened while they underwent different painful interventions, with the same results, an analgesic efficacy and good tolerance on the part of the patients
