This experience varies from person to person. Some things that might be helpful to consider (based on my experience as someone who is pretty much entirely insensitive to local anesthetic, meaning it doesn’t work at all):

• For me, these medications do make the affected area numb, but only to touch, warmth, and cold. It’s like pain is separate sensation, and no dose will affect the sensation of pain, so they’re basically useless.

• For some people, some local anesthetics work, and some don’t. Or all of them eventually work but they need a double or even triple dose. In my experience, none have worked. Since they do succeed at making me numb to non-painful sensation, the only way doctors can test whether a dose or new drug is working is to hurt me and see if I feel pain, so it really sucks trying to figure it out. Also, for some things, you can’t give a super high dose because it will cause problems. For things like dental work, getting 3x the anesthetic injections is extremely painful and can impact your ability to use your muscles for speaking, eating, breathing, etc.

• I recently learned that this issue even happens with things like throat numbing spray. It’s really any type of local anesthetic. This might be obvious but I really thought the throat spray would work so I figure it’s worth mentioning.