"Recovery from anesthesia, is not simply the result of the anesthetic 'wearing off' but also of the brain finding its way back through a maze of possible activity states to those that allow conscious experience," noted researcher Andrew Hudson in a statement. "Put simply, the brain reboots itself."
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| "Don't freak out - it's just a save-the-date" |
15 comments:
There are some really smart people out there who understand that kind of stuff and I am not one of them.
I'm not sure "erasing" is the best description of what goes on, or, stops going on, to be more precise.
Diethyl ether and chloroform were some of the first synthetic anesthetics used. Ethanol is of course older, but the two synthetics had the advantage that they could be dosed as gases and that excesses are excreted back out through the lungs unless of course the patient has OD'd. Ethanol lacks that advantage. Blame it on hydrogen bonding.
I believe that many modern anesthetics are still small, volatile halocarbons. They are small enough to get in and out of the bloodstream and also able to pick molecular locks in a general way, fitting into active sites temporarily and reversibly.
It's also one of history's greatest advances.
Along with antibiotics.
Imagine life with neither.
That's the whole human experience up until sometime in the 19th century.
I was anesthetized (propofol) four times times last year over a span of seven months, and I'm perfectly...umm...
What?
Propofol is also a remarkably simple small molecule.
"rebooting" sounds scary.
I wonder whether they've finally gotten all the bugs out of that kind of anesthesia that made women think the doctor jumped their bones while they were out cold.
I wonder whether they've finally gotten all the bugs out of that kind of anesthesia that made women think the doctor jumped their bones while they were out cold.
The soreness was caused by childbirth, mostly likely.
Propofol was also Michael Jackson's sedative of choice.
I Wanna Be Sedated
That's where i heard of it. It killed the dancer.
I recently saw a list of the 100 greatest inventions. Anesthetics ranked way down in the 90's. The person who compiled the list had obviously never had major surgery.
So is drinking alcohol a form of limited rebooting?
If you got polled just before surgery, anesthesia would go up dramatically in most important inventions/discoveries in modern history!
Timing is important.
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