Insights on sedation vs general anesthesia

Gianluca Bini, DVM, MRCVS, DACVAA, owner and founder of the Safe Pet Anesthesia tele-consulting and training company and assistant professor of anesthesiology and pain management at Oklahoma State University, shared his expertise with veterinary professionals at the 2025 Fetch dvm360 Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. During the event, he presented multiple continuing education (CE) sessions on anesthesia and pain management.

In an interview with dvm360, Bini provided additional insights about his CE session. In this segment of the interview, he describes how sedation compares to general anesthesia, including risks and benefits.

The following is a transcript of the video:

Gianluca Bini, DVM, MRCVS, DACVAA: The benefit of sedation is definitely timing, right? We just give an injection. The patient gets sedated. We do what we need to do, and then can either reverse them or, usually, the synaptic drugs don't last that long. So…they can wake up. The risk of general anesthesia, of course, is always that when a patient is anesthetized, that they lose a lot of their physiologic functions, or like they usually lose their swallowing reflex so they can’t protect their airways. They hypoventilate, so they start breathing less frequently and sometimes with smaller breaths.

Sedation, though…although sometimes it seems very benign, in reality, sedation can be as dangerous as general anesthesia, right? So if your patient gets too sedated, your patient is basically almost anesthetized. So the fine line between sedation and anesthesia, for me, from an anesthesiology standpoint, comes into ‘is my patient able to swallow?’ And if it is, then, I carry on with my procedure. But if, if my patient loses the ability to protect its airways, then I need to intubate it and convert to general anesthesia. So there are pros and cons to both. Sedation seems like the quick and easy answer sometimes, but it could be more dangerous than you think.