I won't be so unkind as to offer any guesses. I see that you WILL, however, grace us with an insinuation.
Anaesthesia is at least as reasonable an analogy as snake oil, in context.
Plenty of doctors treated plenty of patients without anaesthetics for many centuries, and frankly, that was probably the right choice for them to make, absent conclusive evidence to the contrary. If you have, I'd like to hear more details about the experience. Now take some off ice and see if you can get them back. This is rather like saying that the standards and practices used in battlefield emergency medicine should be applied everywhere, regardless of the urgency of the situation. Why even bring this up, and in a sci.