Plastic Surgery Patients and Anesthesia
A new book, “Before the Scalpel” has just come onto the market and devotes one chapter to telling plastic surgery patients what to expect if they are “put under.”
If you read many blog posts about cosmetic plastic surgery, you’ll find a large percentage of patients do not want to be put under anesthesia under any circumstances and then make choices about rejuvenation surgery from there.
Dr. Rey, star of T.V.’s Dr. 90210, observes in an amazon.com review: “(Before the Scalpel is a) very timely publication; it fills that gap in every patient’s operative preparation.”
Long story short: modern anesthesia has gotten a bad rap.
The book’s author, Panchali Dhar, M.D., an assistant professor of clinical anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, provides a checklist of items to remember at each chapters’ end, along with suggested questions to ask your anesthesiologist.
Dr. Dhar observes that by the time most people are 50 they have at least three experiences with some form of anesthesia.
But many patients only know – or have heard from others – that anesthesia makes you nauseous, causes terrible hangovers and requires quite a long recovery.
But that’s no longer true. The field of anesthesia has come a long way in just a few short years. Thanks to the explosion of information processing technology and micro circuitry, all the instruments needed to keep a close eye on a patient’s vital signs now take up no more space than a desktop computer.
Plastic surgeons, depending on the procedure they are doing, often want their patients to lie totally still. Those procedures include:
Surgeons work only an inch above the lungs and heart.
If the patient were to squirm, the liposuction wand, or canula, could puncture an internal organ.
Additionally, plastic surgeons don’t require the deepest anesthesiology because they are working just under the skin and don’t enter the major body cavities.
Local anesthesia with intravenous sedation also allows pain to be blocked. But at the same time, the patient can sit upright, cooperate with the surgeon and answer questions. But no memory of the procedure will be retained.
That type of anesthesia is good for procedures like:
where symmetry must be consistent.
admin @ March 26, 2009