Anesthesia Malpractice and Anesthesia Mistakes

AnaesthesiaWhen 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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Anaesthesia During An Endoscopy

AnaesthesiaWhat are the choices?

Some people feel that they will not be able to manage without some sedation, whereas others prefer to be wide awake and remain in control. The two anaesthetic options are a throat spray to numb your throat or a sedative injection that will relax you. Which option you choose depends on how you feel about the test. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages, and the final choice is usually left to the individual concerned, although different departments have different ways of working.

Throat spray

This is the simplest option. Before inserting the endoscope, the endoscopist or assistant sprays some local anaesthetic solution onto the back of your throat, making it numb. You then lie comfortably on your side and remain wide awake throughout the test. The main advantage of having only the throat spray is that you remain in complete control Read the rest of this entry »

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Anesthesia: What you need to know

AnaesthesiaWhat 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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