Anesthesiology

Anesthesiology is the practice of perioperative medicine. Anesthesiologist evaluates and optimizes the patient before surgery, provides pain relief and life support functions during surgery and takes care of the patient post-operatively till discharge from recovery area or surgical intensive care unit. Pain Medicine is a subspecialty of anesthesia to control acute as well as chronic pain due to various causes effectively.

Critical Care Medicine is defined as the direct delivery by a physician of medical care for a critically ill or critically injured patient. A critical illness or injury acutely impairs one or more vital organ system such that there is high probability of imminent or life threatening deterioration in the patient’s condition.

• Cardiothoracic Anesthesia
• Critical Care
• Obstetric Anesthesia
• Pain Medicine
• Pediatric Anesthesia

There are mainly two kinds of anesthesia provided for the patients while undergoing surgery. They are:

• General Anesthesia (GA)
• Regional Anesthesia (RA)

During GA the patient will go off to sleep and will not be aware. This can be achieved by medications given either directly into the blood or through lungs.

In regional anesthesia only those parts of the body where procedure is done will be anesthetized by blocking the nerve conduction by local anesthetic medications. This can be topical block, peripheral nerve block, regional nerve block or central neuraxial block.

During anesthesia various physiological parameters like oxygen saturation, expired CO2 levels, inspired oxygen, heart rate, ECG, blood pressure and temperature are routinely monitored and maintained in the normal range. Advanced monitoring like pulmonary artery catheterization, continuous cardiac output, transesophageal echo are also available for use in patients with co-morbid diseases to increase the safety profile.