Anesthetics Essay

Chemistry of Anesthetics

“An estimated 40 million anesthetics are administered every year in this country. Anesthesiologists provide or participate in more than 90 percent of anesthetics,” (American Society of Anesthesiologists). Anesthetics are a type of medication that is used to induce a lack of feeling. Within the drug class of anesthetics there are two types of anesthetics, general anesthetics and local anesthetics. Anesthetics are fundamentally based upon the chemical field of medicine.

General Anesthesia

General anesthetics are a type of medication that is usually administered in a gaseous form, and makes the patient go unconscious, and experience lack of feeling and sensation. The general anesthetic targets the spinal cord, (immobilizes the patient), the brain stem reticular activating system, (knocks the patient out), and the cerebral cortex (changes electrical activity on an electroencephalogram). Anesthesia is administered through gas, an IV line, or both. It can keep the patient under for a short amount of time (such as 3 hours) to longer surgeries (such as 8 hours). There are a couple of different types of anesthetics. For example there is nitrous oxide (N20), Halothane, Ketamine, and so many more.

Nitrous oxide was discovered in 1772 by Joseph Priestley. Priestley made the N20 by “heating ammonium nitrate in the presence of iron filings, and then passing the gas that came off (NO) through water to remove toxic by-products” (School of Chemistry, University of Bristol). The equation he came to discover was:

2NO + H2O + Fe arrow N2O + Fe(OH)2

It was first used in the early 1840s, when a man in the crowd volunteered to inhale the gas. The gas caused him to the man to lose feeling and so ...

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...inistered into the muscle, it then spreads to the nerve and blood stream, to block all pain responses to that part of the body. In figure three, the patient would be numbed in the arm on that side of the body.

While general anesthesia is administered by an anesthesiologist, local anesthetics can be administered by many different types of medical care providers, because the local anesthetic is a shot opposed to a gas. As local anesthetics are safer and easier to administer, they are used whenever possible to avoid of all major complications during surgical or medical procedures.

Local anesthetics works completely different than the general anesthesia. “Local anesthetics inhibit depolarization of the nerve membrane by interfering with both Na+ and K+ currents. The action potential is not propagated because the threshold level is never attained, (Medscape).