ETT requires deeper anesthetic levels to maintain anesthesia and that leads to more PONV and longer PACU stay!
Unskilled anesthesiologists and CRNAs like to intubate and paralyze every patient and as a result they get more PONV and longer PACU stays.
These are simple facts that everyone knows!
If you use an LMA and you want your patient to not move during surgery you need
a) a MAC+ of volatile, or
b) less than a MAC of volatile plus something else with a partial MAC equivalent (opiate, benzo, ketamine, etc) OR effective regional/local, or
c) paralytic
Most sane people don't use a pure volatile technique for either a LMA or ETT case. The point everyone else has been making in this thread is that (absent a regional technique providing a surgical level block) the depth of anesthesia required to tolerate the procedure is going to be sufficient to tolerate
either a LMA or ETT.
This notion that general anesthetics with ETTs somehow always (or even usually) require deeper levels of anesthesia is bizarre.
These are simple facts that everyone knows.
🙂
I agree with you, that beginners and unskilled people lean on paralytics as a crutch to get through inelegant / unbalanced anesthetics with ETTs. But IMO paralytics are way overused in general, and I think you're confusing
that problem to be related to the airway device chosen.
Avoiding excessive muscle relaxant and the cost/PONV associated with reversal is a good thing. It's possible to do that with an ETT,
especially in the sort of cases that can be reasonably done with LMAs.
To each his own (and again I like to use LMAs in
simple cases to keep them a little simpler) but dogmatically declaring that "ETT requires deeper anesthetic levels to maintain anesthesia and that leads to more PONV and longer PACU stays" is just wrong.