News About Anesthesia

It’s a familiar tale of inexorable demographics and health trends: the rapid graying of America, the growing chronic disease burden, and the exodus of physicians and nurses from the baby boomer generation into retirement, thus fueling a health care worker shortage that will mushroom over the next two decades. The story translates into impending recruitment challenges for medical practices and institutions across the sector to meet the large and still-growing demand for medical care, including surgery—with its attendant anesthesia services—to serve a burgeoning population of older, sicker patients.

When Colorado legalized marijuana, it became a pioneer in creating new policies to deal with the drug. Now the state’s surgeons, nurses and anesthesiologists are becoming pioneers of a different sort in understanding what weed may do to patients who go under the knife. Their observations and initial research show that marijuana use may affect patients’ responses to anesthesia on the operating table — and, depending on the patient’s history of using the drug, either help or hinder their symptoms afterward in the recovery room.

An additional, well-trained professional who is capable of providing anesthesia and managing a patient under sedation should be present for all pediatric dental procedures, according to a joint statement from the American Society of Anesthesiologists, Society for Pediatric Anesthesia, American Society of Dentist Anesthesiologists and Society for Pediatric Sedation.

The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation has awarded its three annual prizes, regarded as the United States’s most prestigious biomedical research awards, to four researchers in fields including genetics and anesthetic drug development. The Laskers often precede a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Since the awards were founded in 1945, 87 Lasker laureates have later gotten the call from Stockholm. John “Iain” Glen, a Scottish veterinary-anesthesiologist now retired from AstraZeneca, the biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Cambridge, U.K., won the clinical award for development of propofol. One of the most widely used drugs for inducing anesthesia, propofol is administered some 60 million times per year in the United States.

In the small town of Jefferson, Georgia, about 20 miles from the University of Georgia in Athens, a 26-year-old physician named Crawford Williamson Long removed a tumor from the neck of a man named James Venable while Venable was anesthesized with ether. The date was March 30, 1842. More than four years later, in Boston, Massachusetts, on Oct. 16, 1846, Thomas Morton, a dentist using ether, served as anesthesiologist while Dr. John Warren, a surgeon at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, performed surgery on a patient’s neck. A physician observer rushed the news to local newspapers and medical journals, and thus history was written – inaccurately.