New Jersey Anesthesia Error Attorney

Anesthesia Makes Modern Surgery Possible

It involves the use of very powerful drugs used to put a patient in a sleep-like state where no pain should be felt. The use of anesthesia is like walking a tightrope: if not enough is used, it doesn’t work properly. Use too much and it may literally kill the patient, especially if the patient has lung or heart problems. How much responsibility does an anesthesiologist (a doctor specializing in anesthesia) have? That person literally has the patient’s life in his or her hands. The anesthesiologist may be the highest paid person in the operating room, and for good reason. 

What Is Anesthesia? 

Anesthesia is a medical treatment preventing patients from feeling pain during surgery or some other medical procedure. Each year thousands of patients in New Jersey undergo surgery with anesthesia. Most have no problems with it, but there are some people who can be seriously injured or killed due to anesthesiology mistakes.

Anesthesia has several goals, including:

• Sedation
• Unconsciousness
• Immobility
• Analgesia (lack of pain)
• Amnesia (lack of memory).

Drugs referred to as anesthetics target each of these elements. They fall into one of two broad categories: general and local/regional. These are the characteristics of general anesthesia:

• It impacts the whole body.
• It is used when a patient needs to be unconscious or at least heavily sedated for a medical procedure.
• May be delivered intravenously or breathed in as a gas.
• Used intravenously, it acts and disappears rapidly from the bloodstream, so patients can go home quickly after surgery.
• In gas form, it normally takes longer to wear off.

What Are the Risks of Anesthesia?

Anesthesia was first used in 1846. Despite nearly two hundred years of use, we don’t know exactly how it works. At first it was thought anesthesia blocks nerve cell signaling. Current research indicates anesthetics interfere with nerve signals by targeting specific protein molecules embedded in nerve cell membranes. Inhaled and intravenous anesthetics may each act on a different set of molecules to cause their effects.

General anesthetics are normally safe for most patients, but these potent drugs pose risks, particularly for these groups of patients:

• The elderly
• Those with certain genetic variations
• Those with some chronic, systemic diseases, such as diabetes

Older and younger patients may have lingering side effects for days after general anesthesia is used. Local and regional anesthesia blocks pain in a part of the body. Local anesthetics can impact a small part of the body (such as a tooth or toe), while regional anesthetics can affect large areas of the body, such as everything below the waist.