6
The purpose of fasting before a procedure involving anesthesia is to avoid aspiration of stomach contents, not anything related to drug efficacy. Your anesthesiologist/physician/dentist/nurse wants you to have an empty stomach so you don't regurgitate and then inhale food while your reflexes are suppressed.
Fasting procedures can depend on the specific ...
6
This depends on the type of anesthetic used, there are plenty:
Types of anesthetic
which include:
Esters (Benzocaine, Cyclomethycaine, Propoxycaine)
Amides (Bupivacaine, Mepivacaine, Trimecaine)
Naturals (Saxitoxin, Tetrodotoxin, Spilanthol).
This link:
How to overcome failed local anaethesia
is dental specific, and lists possible causes of local ...
5
Addiction has both psychological and physical components.
Many sedatives, such as benzodiazepines (e.g. lorazepam or diazepam), do have a potential for both.
Physically, it takes more than one administration to create a chemical dependence, so that is not likely to have happened.
Physically, Nitrous Oxide is not known to create a chemical dependence - ...
5
Catecholamines
This interaction relates to a broad family of hormones called catecholamines. There are many examples and they share a common structure.
Dopamine
Adrenaline (epinephrine)
Notice the common structure of catechol (the carbon ring with two hydroxyl (OH) groups) and an amine (NH2) group.
This group of hormones and neurotransmitters act as part ...
4
In addition to JonMark Perry's excellent answer it's also worth noting that many of us aren't wired the same as everyone one else.
When your dentist tries to numb a particular tooth, he or she is trying to numb the particular nerve, or group of nerves, that innervates that tooth. Those nerves may not be in the same location as the next patient. This blog by ...
3
Previous estimates were at 1 in a 1000 patients (1‰) suffer from intraoperative awareness:
The medical literature suggests that in- traoperative awareness with recall while under general anesthesia may occur to some degree at a frequency of approximately 1 – 2 in 1,000 anesthetics. Most patients experiencing intraoperative awareness do not feel any pain.
...
3
Side-effects of medicines (such as drowsiness with tramadol) should be reported to and managed by the patient's healthcare team - in the best case by the doctor who prescribed the medicine, but you can also contact your pharmacist or in severe and urgent cases the ER or poisoning control centre.
To answer the theoretical part of your question:
Martindale, ...
3
Sleep and general anaesthesia share a few similarities, but also have differences. From what I have read, they are sufficiently different that comparing anaesthesia to a certain sleep phase doesn't make sense.
I recommend reading General Anesthesia and Altered States of Arousal: A Systems Neuroscience Analysis, which I found trying to answer a different ...
3
Tefikow, S., J. Barth, S. Maichrowitz, A. Beelmann, B. Strauss, and J. Rosendahl. "Efficacy of Hypnosis in Adults Undergoing Surgery or Medical Procedures: A Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials." Clinical Psychology Review 33.5 (2013): 623-36. Web.
Here's a peer reviewed meta analysis that also found hypnosis to be beneficial during surgery when ...
2
I did some article browsing and here's what I found:
Almost all of the articles I came across discussed the affect of general anesthesia on certain nerve tissues, ion channels, and receptors. I could not find a good overview or any peer reviewed articles covering the long-term clinical effects (what impact it actually has on the patient) of general ...
2
You're right that sleep and general anesthesia are very different, and general anesthesia in fact actively inhibits the glymphatic circulation that clears waste products from the brain). Since most of are able to pull an all-nighter and except for problems with memory, focus etc, be OK after a couple of days' catch-up sleep, the sleep deprivation isn't an ...
2
Amnesia is very important in anesthesiology
Indeed, this is a concern in the anesthesiology community as well. I recall a friend and former colleague of mine was involved in a project including this paper (in which I had no involvement):
Raz, A., Eimerl, D., Zaidel, A., Bergman, H., & Israel, Z. (2010). Propofol decreases neuronal population spiking ...
2
The definitions of conscious sedation and procedural sedation certainly blend through one another, but typically "conscious sedation" means the patient appears conscious to the provider or bystander, not necessarily the patient. In procedural sedation, a patient may appear asleep or be completely dissociated (such as with ketamine). There are many examples ...
1
The only one of those categories that should get the "general" modifier is anesthetic - this is to contrast them with local anesthetics, which are the "numbing agents" you describe.
General anesthetics
General anesthesics are agents that cause loss of consciousness. They prevent conscious perception of pain by causing loss of consciousness, rather than ...
1
I do know that something can be injected into a patient's IV to wake them up immediately from general anaesthesia.
That's not how it works.
Many anaesthetics only work for minutes at best. A normal dosage of propofol would have to be renewed every 5-10 minutes. To "wake" you from general anaesthesia, they just stop administering anaesthetic agents....
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible