General anaesthesia

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General anaesthesia
Equipment used for anaesthesia in the operating room
Specialty	Anaesthetics
Uses	Facilitating surgery, terminal sedation[1]
Complications	Anaesthesia awareness,[2] overdose,[3] death[4]
MeSH	D000768
MedlinePlus	007410
[edit on Wikidata]

General anaesthesia (UK) or general anesthesia (US) is a method of medically inducing loss of consciousness that renders a patient unarousable even with painful stimuli.^[5] This effect is achieved by administering either intravenous or inhalational general anaesthetic medications, which often act in combination with an analgesic and neuromuscular blocking agent. Spontaneous ventilation is often inadequate during the procedure and intervention is often necessary to protect the airway.^[5] General anaesthesia is generally performed in an operating theater to allow surgical procedures that would otherwise be intolerably painful for a patient, or in an intensive care unit or emergency department to facilitate endotracheal intubation and mechanical ventilation in critically ill patients. Depending on the procedure, general anaesthesia may be optional or required. Regardless of whether a patient may prefer to be unconscious or not, certain pain stimuli could result in involuntary responses from the patient (such as movement or muscle contractions) that may make an operation extremely difficult. Thus, for many procedures, general anaesthesia is required from a practical perspective.

A variety of drugs may be administered, with the overall goal of achieving unconsciousness, amnesia, analgesia, loss of reflexes of the autonomic nervous system, and in some cases paralysis of skeletal muscles. The optimal combination of anesthetics for any given patient and procedure is typically selected by an anaesthetist, or another provider such as a nurse anaesthetist (depending on local practice and law), in consultation with the patient and the surgeon, dentist, or other practitioner performing the operative procedure.^[6]