Most of ours use the beachchair arrangement of some sort - IMHO, the absolute most dangerous of any position we use - totally unstable, high center of gravity, restricted chest movement from the damn straps, surgeons pulling so hard they actually pull the patients head out of the headrest they have been secured to, and just a royal pain in the *** overall. I'm just waiting for one of the larger patients to hit the floor someday. I love the few talented ortho surgeons we have left that can very easily do all these types of cases in a lateral position.
Due to ongoing concerns about hypotensive anesthesia in general, and particularly after the recent APSF article, we have pretty much abandoned hypotensive techniques. Too much potential risks on spines (POVL in particular), ditto for the shoulders, and not really that much benefit to the surgeons. I'm really surprised most of you don't seem to be concerned about the APSF article - it put the fear of God in many of us as well as our surgeons. We seem to see a lot of older patients having shoulder surgery, so our tolerance for hypotension is already pretty low.
I know I've started calculating a correction (not on the anesthesia record) to give me a better idea of where my BP truly is. The correction is 0.77mmHg for each CM of gradient, or about 2mmHg per inch.