The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Anaesthesia, without the side-effects

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jun 17, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Anaesthesia, without the side-effects

Staff Reporter

Workshop to give postgraduate students hands on training

CHENNAI: The sixth edition of the annual continuing medical education programme of the Department of Anaesthesiology of the Madras Medical College will be held here on Sunday.The theme of the programme will be `safe practices of anaesthesia'.

Postgraduate students will receive hands on training at the workshop on `anaesthesia machine' in the afternoon session.

The workshop will discuss recent advances in anaesthesia. Until recently ECG machines were used in operating theatres, but newer, smaller echo cardiograph machines made a surgeon's task less difficult, said R. Chandrasekaran, chief co-ordinator of the meet.

Though general anaesthesia is the preferred mode of putting patients out of pain during surgery, other methods such as epidural and spinal anaesthesia are also widely practised now.

Patients who receive general anaesthesia suffer post-surgery from vomiting and need periodic pain relievers. In spinal anaesthesia, the problems are even more as the drug gets into the cerebro spinal fluid. In epidural anaesthesia, the drug blocks the function of nerves only. A patient will not suffer from problems such as fall in blood pressure, difficulty in breathing and headache.

Thus epidural anaesthesia has now come to occupy a big place in major and minor surgeries.

Open-heart surgeries are performed under segmental epidural anaesthesia, where only a few segments relating to the heart are anaesthetised.

Morbidly obese patients present a problem for anaesthetists, as their vein is not easily "visible". Post-surgery, such people suffer from breathing problems as the diaphragmatic movement is affected.

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