Thursday, December 30, 2010
Anesthesia puts you to "sleep"? Not really
That's right. Your doctors, dentist and other medical professionals have been lying to you. Anesthesia doesn't put you to sleep. A new study shows that it actually puts you into a "reversible coma" or like being knocked unconscious. This was figured out by looking at the pattern of brain waves while under anesthesia and comparing them to sleeping brain wave patterns. However, the brain waves of an anesthetized patient was more like a deeply unconscious coma patient. But just because the affects of anesthesia are a little different than what you thought they were, it doesn't mean that it is better or worse than what it was before. Hopefully, people won't start fearing that they will slip into an actual coma from anesthesia when this study has the opposite affect. This study could help fix sleep disorders or recovery from comas.
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3 comments:
Oh wow, I always thought Anesthesia was something that helped put people to sleep but I guess not. I know view Anesthesia differently now...instead of it helping individuals to fall asleep, I guess it just puts people into a reversible coma.
Hmmm, an interesting proposal in that this could help with sleep disorders like insomnia. However,the thought of a "reversible coma" is, to be honest, kind of frightening. I highly doubt that anesthesia will be released for that kind of medicine anytime soon though.
This actually makes sense, because if you really think about, if a patient were having extensive surgery that would be very painful when awake, just being asleep wouldn't be enough to ensure that the patient won't feel anything or wake up. The pain alone would probably be enough to wake up even the deepest sleeper. Something else would have to be done, something much stronger and more powerful that would completetly knock them out, like a reversible coma.
This also explains people who become conscious during surgery and feel everything that is happening to them but cannot move or yell for help. It probably means that they were not given enough anethesia to put them into a deep enough coma, or something like that, not that they "woke up" during surgery.
Still, the thought of being put to sleep for surgery is easier to take in than the thought of being put in a coma, even a reversible one, which is probably why doctors and dentists will continue to tell us it puts us to "sleep."
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