Fantastic, will have to watch the rest.

ah, anyone seen "Flatliners?"

I've actually seen similar effects induced with hypnosis. Lots of fun stuff.

BBC3 and 4 are the best tv channels evar!

I'm going in for surgery soon. A bit worried about anesthetic. I've watched too many of these surgery docs. I didn't like the one that speculated that anesthesia just affected the formation of memory. So your paralyzed and conscious, you just don't remember it....

I hope I can ease some worries out there. The press and media, while sometimes having good intent, are unnecessarily scaring the crap out of the public right how. (Don't even get me started on the recent movie "Awake.") This entry might be a bit long, so bear with me.

First, people get "sedation" and "general anesthesia" confused. If you are having a colonoscopy or similar procedure performed, chances are you are receiving "conscious sedation." This is the type of anesthesia that mostly affects memory formation. Most people don't remember the procedure because of the amnesia, but if you watched a film of yourself, you would see that there would be times when you were awake and cooperative. Many times you carry on complete rational conversations that you don't remember. (This disturbs some, because they think they are going to say something inappropriate, but that very rarely happens.) Sometimes people do remember part, or all, of a procedure like that. It just depends on the individual and how much of what kind of drugs you received. The goal is to make you comfortable, not necessarily unconscious.

The goal of general anesthesia is to make you unconscious. Of course, by definition, that means you are incapable of being aware of your environment. If you are in good health, general anesthesia, in and of itself, is a VERY low risk proposition. When you drive to the hospital, you are probably taking about the same risk of serious injury, (from an traffic accident), as having a routine general anesthetic.

There is a campaign underway right now to make people aware of "awareness." By awareness in this context we are not talking about "sedation." We are talking about general anesthesia. No human or man made machine is perfect. There are rare instances of people regaining consciousness during general anesthesia at times when it was intended to have them unconscious. Anesthesiologists are studying this intensively right now. The goal is to identify those at risk, and evaluate new brain "wave" monitoring that may decrease the risk. We already know the group most at risk and that is severely injured patients and patients having emergency surgery. When a patient is in "shock" with a low blood pressure, they can't receive a normal dose of anesthesia without the likelihood of doing them serious harm. The patient often times has to be stabilized before full anesthesia can be administered.
Awareness during routine general anesthesia is more rare. The great majority of times it consists of patients remembering snippets of conversation or movement. Much less frequently does it involve any sensation of the surgery. If you would like more information on "awareness" please visit this website;
http://www.asahq.org/patientEducation.htm

If anyone has general questions about facets of anesthesia, please visit my profile page and I will be glad to see if I can assist you.

Anesthesia is safe and effective. All anesthesiologists desire to make it even more so.