In his book The Power of Now, Dr. S.M. Atash, the dentist and author of Dentistry A To Z, gives us a great guide to understanding the way the body reacts to anesthesia.
It may seem surprising at first to you to know that the anesthesia is an important part of the brain, but what you’re really experiencing is how it affects the brain. If you’re an anaesthetist, then you’re likely to be experiencing a lot of brain tissue damage as an effect of anaesthetic treatments. You’ll notice, however, that your brain is also affected by the effects of anaesthetics.
The effects of an anaesthetic on the brain are many and varied. In general, they can be severe, causing headaches and other problems, or less severe, but still serious, and can even cause convulsions, which can be dangerous. Fortunately, you can use your knowledge of anaesthetics to avoid any problems you experience while in the midst of anaesthesia.
We all know that the idea of anaesthetics is that they are painless. However, if you’ve been in for long enough, you’ll find that the pain is more than just pain, and that it’s actually a very real effect of the anaesthetic. When you are in an anaesthetic, you are basically forced to stop your brain’s normal functioning.
This is a little bit of a joke-a bit of a metaphor. As a person who’s already been in an anaesthetic, you have no such thing as a normal state of consciousness. You can literally feel how your head is vibrating, but it’s actually a very real feeling. You can’t actually feel what your brain is vibrating.
Its a painful feeling, but it is real, and it is actually a form of consciousness. When you are in an anaesthetic, it is literally impossible for the brain to do anything. A brain in an anaesthetic is completely unconscious.
As a patient, you are in a state of unconsciousness when you are being given an anaesthetic. This is something that happens to all sorts of patients as well – we all know someone who has a brain injury of some sort, but it does happen to some people to a much greater extent. When you are in this state, you feel like you are in a dream, and it is hard to remember what you are doing.
One of the most common ways that we know of someone waking up after having an anaesthetic is through the loss of consciousness (LOC). As the patient wakes up from the anaesthetic, the LOC is usually evident and can be incredibly disorienting. To the uninitiated, they may not even realize they are in a dream. But the patient is in a state of unconsciousness, so they do not have any memories of what happened to them while they were asleep.
If you have a bad dream, you can have a bad anaesthetic. This is the best time to describe the dream by telling yourself that it was a dream, but you still have to describe the event that caused it.
To the patient waking up, they may not realize that they have fractured a tooth when they are in the state of unconsciousness. When they wake up the dentist has already finished cleaning the tooth, so they are not aware of their broken tooth.
