Anesthesia
Benefits
Anesthesia is the use of medicines to prevent pain during surgery and other procedures. These medicines are called anesthetics. They may be given by injection, inhalation, topical lotion, spray, eye drops, or skin patch. They cause you to have a loss of feeling or awareness. . Without general anesthesia, many major, life-saving procedures would not be possible, including open-heart surgery, brain surgery, and organ transplants.
Negative Impact
This can cause numbness or paralysis (inability to move a part of the body), although this may be a result of the surgery itself. If the damage is slight, you may get better in a few days to a few weeks. Permanent damage to the peripheral nerves, which run between the spinal cord and the rest of the body, occurs in around 1 in 1,000 people having a general anaesthetic.
An allergic reaction to an anaesthetic medicine: Although an allergic reaction (anaphylaxis) can be severe, appropriate treatment is on hand to enable the best chance of dealing with this immediately and effectively. The risk of death solely attributable to anesthesia is approximately 1 in 185,000 according to anesthesia textbooks. However, looking at a large study that reviewed nearly 2.9 million people that had general anesthesia, the death rate was around 33 per 100,000 people, or equivalent to 3.3 in 10,000.
Invention History
Up until the mid-1800s, however, surgeons could not offer patients much more than opium, alcohol or a bullet to bite on to deal with the agonizing pain of surgery. Dr Henry Hickman described the use of carbon dioxide to produce loss of consciousness, while Horace Wells first used nitrous oxide for extraction of teeth in 1844. On 16 October 1846, Dr William Morton gave the first public demonstration of ether anaesthesia in Boston. (The operating room where this occurred, known as the Ether Dome, is preserved intact at the Massachusetts General Hospital.) This major advance in the relief of human suffering spread rapidly, and the first use of ether in England and Scotland followed soon after.
