Complexity Digest 2004.27 - 04.02

05-Jul-2004

Anesthetics Are Slowly Giving Up The Secrets Of How They Work, Science News Bookmark and Share

Excerpts:
The first successful demonstration of ether's use as a surgical anesthetic was conducted in 1846. William T.G. Morton, who administered the ether for the removal of a tumor from a patient's jaw, is to the immediate left of the patient.(© Bettmann/CORBIS)
Combining amnesia, sedation, immobility, and insensitivity to pain, general anesthesia is an unnatural state: a physician-induced "central nervous system dysfunction," (...).

One of the central questions of anesthesia research has been whether all these drugs work in the same manner. Until the last few decades, investigators generally held that, despite chemical differences, the drugs share a mechanism of action.

One long-standing theory was based on the simple observation that the more soluble an anesthetic is in olive oil, the more effective it is.