Why is general anaesthesia so risky and dangerous?
Anaesthesia is not dangerous if a qualifed doctor (UK) or Technician/Nurse under the guidance of a doctors (USA) is giving you the anaesthetic. It can become dangerous if an adverse reaction occurs (very very unlikely) or your state of health is poor to start with. So how poor is poor? Well by this we are talking about end stage respiratory disease, uncompensated heart failure sort of problems. Most other cases the anaesthetic will be a success, It then depends if the ‘unwell patient’ has enough physiological reserve to ‘heal’ and recover from the surgical traumatic insult. This is quite different from the anaesthetic itself, but still a part of recovering from surgery. The vast majority of cases will be fine, if doctors start to talk about survival chance/percentages you need to listen carefully.
