How does anesthesia work?
Moment Of Um
Lemonada Media
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 4 November 2024
⏱️ 5 minutes
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Summary
Sometimes, doctors use something called anesthesia to help them treat patients. Anesthesia can be different substances, but they all prevent our bodies from feeling pain during a medical treatment or surgery. So how does anesthesia stop us from feeling pain?
We asked Dr. Kaveh Hoda to help us find the answer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um. Answering those questions that make you go, um, um, um, moment of um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Anna Goldfield. |
| 0:28.5 | Um. |
| 0:32.5 | When I was 18, I had to have surgery to remove my wisdom teeth. |
| 0:38.9 | Normally, humans have three back teeth called molars on each side of the top and bottom of our jaws. The molars grow in |
| 0:44.1 | gradually as we get older, and the ones at the very back are called wisdom teeth, because |
| 0:49.0 | they come in last as you're entering adulthood and becoming wiser, I guess. Anyway, like a lot of people, I had to get |
| 0:56.7 | mine removed because there wasn't enough space at the back of my jaw. So I had to go to the |
| 1:01.0 | dental surgeon, and he gave me what's called general anesthesia. He put a little plastic mask |
| 1:06.6 | over my face and told me to breathe in slowly as I counted backwards from 10. |
| 1:11.7 | I think I made it to the number six before I was completely asleep. |
| 1:17.0 | When I woke up, the surgery was done and I hadn't felt a thing. |
| 1:20.9 | I remember being really, really groggy for the rest of the day as the anesthesia wore off. |
| 1:26.6 | I'm really grateful for the effects of anesthesia, |
| 1:29.9 | but I don't really know how it works. |
| 1:32.3 | Lachlan was wondering how anesthesia works too, |
| 1:34.5 | so I asked a doctor friend to help us out. |
| 2:05.0 | The general term anesthesia describes different types of medicine that people get before and during surgeries that are given to patients to make sure that they don't feel pain and to help them sleep through a surgery. My name is Kavejoda. I'm a gastroenterologist. |
| 2:11.1 | That's the kind of doctor who specializes in the organs of digestion in your body. |
| 2:19.2 | General is the one I think most people think about, which is when someone has a breathing tube placed into their mouth to help them breathe so they can really sleep totally deeply through the whole process. |
| 2:24.9 | But there's also different forms of it, for example, regional anesthesia, which is where |
| 2:30.1 | they'll just go to the nerve of a specific part of the body and block that. |
| 2:34.4 | So you're not really asleep, but you don't feel the pain in that area. |
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