Anesthesia Malpractice and Anesthesia Mistakes
When a patient approaches a doctor or hospital or any other health care provider, the doctor owes certain duties to the patient. The doctor owes a primary duty of reasonable care. Medical practitioners despite their good intentions, skill and training, may commit mistakes. They are humans after all. But the medical profession demands the medical practitioners to be attentive, competent, and careful in administering their services. The lives of people are at stake. Failure to exercise the required minimum care can result in negligence. Anesthesia malpractice is a type of medical malpractice. Anesthesia (or anaesthesia) generally refers to the use of an anesthetic drug to reduce or prevent pain during surgery or other medical procedures. Anesthesia malpractice is not restricted to the operating room or anesthesiologists. It can happen during pre-operative preparation, post-operatively in the recovery room and in any procedure room in a medical facility or doctor’s office.
Anesthesia mistakes can take place during childbirth and even before the simplest dental procedures and are not limited to anesthesiologists. Administration of anesthesia requires specialized training and certification; certainly, the seriousness and number of complications increases significantly outside of the setting of the anesthesiologist in the operating room. Dental visits, cosmetic surgery procedures, and a host of other out-patient scenarios are all common places for anesthesia to be used and in many such scenarios, the anesthesiologist is not present and the administration is done by the doctors, dentists, surgeons, nurses or other health care providers. Read the rest of this entry »
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Anaesthetic Apparatus
Anaesthesia means loss of feeling or sensation, so that no pain is felt. In surgery this result is obtained by using an anaesthetic. A distinction is to be made between general anaesthesia i.e. total unconsciousness and local anaesthesia i.e. only one area of the body is deprived sensation.
The beginnings of modern anesthetic equipment date back to Morton’s inhalation flagon in 1846. The numerous devices developed and introduced subsequently can be divided into four groups. Simple ether and chloroform masks for open inhalation anesthesia, from Simpson (1847) to Brown (1928). Vapour inhalators according to the draw over principle of Snow (1847) up to the Oxford vaporizer (1941). Closed or half-closed inhalation equipment for ether or chloroform with to and fro breathing, from Clover (1877) to Ombredanne (1908).
Equipment for anaesthesia with nitrous oxide. From 1868 onwards this led to the incorporation of gas bottles in anaesthetic equipment and between 1885 and 1890 to the construction of mixing-valves for nitrous oxide and oxygen. In addition, reducing valves, flow meters and vaporizers were developed. The first anaesthetic apparatus with circle system and CO2-absorber was constructed in 1925 by the Drager factory in Lubeck. Sudeck and Schmidt introduced this technique of anaesthesia in the university hospital of Hamburg-Eppendorf between 1920 and 1925. Read the rest of this entry »
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Anesthesia: What you need to know
What is Anaesthesia ?
Surgery without adequate pain control may seem cruel to the modern reader, yet this was the common practice throughout most of history. While anesthesia is considered a relatively new field, surgery predates recorded human history. Human skull trephinations occurred as early as 10,000 BC, with archaeologic evidence of post-procedure bone infection and healing, proving these primitive surgeries were performed on living humans. Juice from coca leaves may have been dribbled onto the scalp wound but the recipient of these procedures was almost certainly awake while a hole was bored into his or her skull with a sharp flake of volcanic glass. This was a unique situation in anesthesia; there are no other instances in which both the operator and his patient share the effects of the same drug.
In contemporary practice, we are prone to forget the realities of pre-anesthesia surgery. Fanny Burney, a well-known literary artist from the early nineteenth century, described a mastectomy she endured after receiving a “wine cordial” as her sole anesthetic. As seven male assistants held her down, the surgery commenced: “When the dreadful steel was Read the rest of this entry »
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