Episode Details

Every day, in operating theatres all over Australia, people are deliberately, reversibly switched off, their pain, memory and movement suspended long enough for a surgeon to work, and then switched safely back on again. This episode explores the different kinds of anaesthesia, from numbing a single tooth to erasing consciousness entirely, what anaesthetic drugs actually do to nerve signalling, and the surprisingly honest scientific fact that nobody yet fully understands how general anaesthesia achieves what it does.

You'll come away understanding the difference between local, regional and general anaesthesia, how anaesthetic drugs interfere with nerve signals at the cellular level, why the exact mechanism of general anaesthesia remains a genuinely open scientific question, how depth of anaesthesia is monitored during surgery, what intraoperative awareness is and how rare it really is, and why the development of anaesthesia transformed what surgery could achieve.

Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au

Further reading: Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA) – patient information on anaesthesia and safety; Royal Australasian College of Surgeons – history of anaesthesia and surgery; Nature Reviews Neuroscience – reviews on the neurobiology of general anaesthesia; National Institutes of Health – overviews of anaesthetic pharmacology.