Word: anesthesia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From a thousand years B.C right up to the Clinton years, we've treated fractures like Carol's with closed reduction and casting. "Treating it closed" meant we set it ("reduced the fracture"), i.e. pulled and twisted (hopefully with some anesthesia) to get the pieces into the best position possible, then we held the wrist still in a plaster cast for a month and a half - 40 days and 40 nights being the magic healing time for most things orthopedic. Done well (and soon) closed reduction works quite well; an experienced orthopedist with good hands can take some horrible-looking...
...little safety data on the use of the vast majority of federally approved drugs, including antidepressants, during pregnancy. Of the dozen or so prescription medications specifically approved for expectant women by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, all are pregnancy-related: drugs for inducing labor, for instance, or epidural anesthesia. That means that each year, thousands of pregnant women with common illnesses - from depression to flu or cancer - must decide whether the benefit of medications outweighs the unknown risks to their fetus...
...much of recorded history, many doctors saw the human heart as the inscrutable, throbbing seat of the soul, an agent too delicate to meddle with. After a few incremental advances, that changed on a wide scale with World War II, when massive carnage forced military doctors to experiment with anesthesia and the other elements of modern surgery. Dr. Dwight Harken, a young Army surgeon, managed to remove shrapnel and bullets from some 130 soldiers' chests without killing one. Buoyed by such successes, in the postwar years surgeons made rapid advances in heart treatments. But they struggled to perform operations that...
...Some researchers, including Lisa Wise-Faberowski, an assistant professor of anesthesiology and pediatric cardiology at the University of Colorado, Denver, think the effect in humans won't be easy to show. At the ASA conference, Wise-Faberowski devoted her presentation to chiding researchers for worrying prematurely about "anesthesia-induced neurotoxicity," pointing out that it has been seen only in "cell cultures and lab animals." If anesthetics have always been neurotoxic, one slide in her presentation asked, "Why is it only an issue now?" She and others point out that non-human testing of anesthetic safety has an unreliable history...
...Every doctor interviewed for this article urged patients not to avoid necessary surgery or forgo required anesthesia. To understand the consequences of going without anesthesia, Wilder points to certain surgical trends in the 1960s. Believing that babies were still too underdeveloped to feel pain, many doctors at the time advocated only light anesthesia or none at all for infants undergoing surgery. "The morbidity and indeed mortality levels were much higher [in these babies]. The stress response to the pain of the surgery proved dangerous," Wilder explains. It is also important to remember how primitive surgical painkilling mechanisms were before...