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Millions of Americans undergo anesthesia each year. Since 1846, doctors have used a variety of drugs to make patients unconscious for surgery, but even though the medications have changed, there's ...
General anaesthesia (UK) or general anesthesia (US) is medically induced loss of consciousness that renders a patient unarousable even by painful stimuli. [5] It is achieved through medications, which can be injected or inhaled, often with an analgesic and neuromuscular blocking agent .
Full wakefulness and general anesthesia are the two extremes of the spectrum. Conscious sedation and monitored anesthesia care (MAC) refer to an awareness somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, depending on the degree to which a patient is sedated. Monitored anesthesia care involves titration of local anesthesia along with sedation and ...
The purpose of anesthesia can be distilled down to three basic goals or endpoints: [2]: 236 hypnosis (a temporary loss of consciousness and with it a loss of memory.In a pharmacological context, the word hypnosis usually has this technical meaning, in contrast to its more familiar lay or psychological meaning of an altered state of consciousness not necessarily caused by drugs—see hypnosis).
Anesthesia – pharmacologically induced and reversible state of amnesia, analgesia, loss of responsiveness, loss of skeletal muscle reflexes or decreased sympathetic nervous system, or all simultaneously. This allows patients to undergo surgery and other procedures without the distress and pain they would otherwise experience.
To determine the depth of anesthesia, the anesthetist relies on a series of physical signs of the patient. In 1847, John Snow (1813–1858) [1] and Francis Plomley [2] attempted to describe various stages of general anesthesia, but Guedel in 1937 described a detailed system which was generally accepted. [3] [4] [5]
To induce general anesthesia, propofol is the drug used almost exclusively, having largely replaced sodium thiopental. [13]It is often administered as part of an anesthesia maintenance technique called total intravenous anesthesia, using either manually programmed infusion pumps or computer-controlled infusion pumps in a process called target controlled infusion (TCI).
Anesthesiology, anaesthesiology or anaesthesia is the medical specialty concerned with the total perioperative care of patients before, during and after surgery. [1] It encompasses anesthesia, intensive care medicine, critical emergency medicine, and pain medicine. [2]