Despite its prevalence in the medical world, the workings of anesthesia are a mystery to many. To clear things up, here’s how general anesthesia works.
Anesthesia is a highly coveted, commonly used medication in the medical industry. The medicine’s invention led to massive advancements in surgery. It allowed healthcare professionals to perform lifesaving treatment without causing pain or distress for their patients.
But the exact way it functions has fallen under frequent debate. While scientists are still searching for answers on the precise workings of general anesthesia, there’s plenty about it that we currently know. Hoping to learn more? Here’s an overview of how general anesthesia works.
What Is Anesthesia?
General anesthesia is a combination of potent medicines that puts patients to sleep. It renders them immobile during surgery and gives them an insensibility to feeling that makes the procedure painless.
General anesthesia is useful for a wide range of medical practices, from open-heart surgery to a simple wisdom tooth removal. Ignoring scattered opinions on how the procedure works, medical professionals have used it for centuries and deemed it generally safe.
What Is the Procedure Like?
The process begins in the home, where the patient participates in a six-hour fast prior to the procedure. They might also abstain from taking any medications that have the potential to cause complications with the surgery or affect the anesthesia’s potency.
Once the patient is ready, either on the operating table or the dentist’s chair, an anesthesiologist will arrive. They’ll feed the anesthesia through an intravenous line placed in the patient’s arm or a fitted mask. For major surgeries, doctors might choose to run a tube down the patient’s throat to ensure that they’re receiving enough oxygen and that their lungs stay protected from bodily fluids.
The anesthesiologist will carefully monitor a patient throughout the procedure. They’ll check and adjust their medication levels and monitor breathing, temperature, fluids, and blood pressure as necessary.
Once the procedure is over, the anesthesiologist will then reverse the medications. The patient will wake up in either the operating room or the recovery ward. Some side effects, like grogginess and nausea, are common aftereffects of anesthesia.
How Does It Work?
So how does general anesthesia work? There are two sides to this question—the technological side and the medical side.
Technological
The details of the procedure itself are straightforward. Unlike in the olden days, medicine-soaked tissues are no longer the delivery method of choice. Hospitals use high-end technology to store and dispense medication and monitor the patient’s vitals.
Anesthesiologists use specialized machines to administer the medication and track the patient’s condition. The components of an anesthesia machine perform a variety of functions that work cooperatively to streamline the process.
Medical
The general functions of anesthesia are obvious and observable, but the exact way the medication works has been the subject of a never-ending, fervent debate.
The longest-running theory was that anesthesia tampered with normal brain activity, lessening it. The dampening of brain waves eliminated or numbed a patient’s pain receptors.
Newer studies suggest that anesthesia alters the neural circuitry that affects sleep. The cells affected by anesthesia seem to be related to both the nervous and endocrine systems. Forcibly activating neuroendocrine cells induced a powerful state of unconsciousness in mice.
This suggests that anesthesia does, in fact, cause the patient to sleep, rather than temporarily shutting off or inhibiting their brain function.