Oxycodone is safe and effective for general anesthesia.

Purpose: In clinical practice, using different opioid analgesics is common during the induction and maintenance of general anesthesia and for postoperative analgesia. However, if the opioid analgesic could be limited to a single drug, we hypothesized that the risk of adverse drug interactions could be reduced, with fewer adverse effects. We examined the use of oxycodone as a single opioid in a well-defined cohort of orthopedic patients undergoing general anesthesia.