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Leaves of the coca plant (Erythroxylum novogranatense var. Novogranatense), from which cocaine, a naturally occurring local anesthetic, is derived. [1] [2]An anesthetic (American English) or anaesthetic (British English; see spelling differences) is a drug used to induce anesthesia — in other words, to result in a temporary loss of sensation or awareness.
General anaesthetics (or anesthetics) are often defined as compounds that induce a loss of consciousness in humans or loss of righting reflex in animals. Clinical definitions are also extended to include an induced coma that causes lack of awareness to painful stimuli, sufficient to facilitate surgical applications in clinical and veterinary practice.
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).
Many local anesthetics fall into two general chemical classes, amino esters (top) and amino amides (bottom). A local anesthetic (LA) is a medication that causes absence of all sensation (including pain) in a specific body part without loss of consciousness, [1] providing local anesthesia, as opposed to a general anesthetic, which eliminates all sensation in the entire body and causes ...
To induce unconsciousness, anaesthetics have myriad sites of action and affect the central nervous system (CNS) at multiple levels. General anaesthesia commonly interrupts or changes the functions of CNS components including the cerebral cortex , thalamus , reticular activating system , and spinal cord .
In Classical antiquity, anaesthetics were described by: Pedanius Dioscorides (De Materia Medica), a Greek physician living in Rome during the first century A.D., who is recorded as the first person to make explicit reference to the administration of mandrake-induced anesthesia to facilitate a surgical intervention. [54] Galen; Hippocrates
The Meyer-Overton correlation for anaesthetics. A nonspecific mechanism of general anaesthetic action was first proposed by Emil Harless and Ernst von Bibra in 1847. [9] They suggested that general anaesthetics may act by dissolving in the fatty fraction of brain cells and removing fatty constituents from them, thus changing activity of brain cells and inducing anaesthesia.
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]
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