What is Anesthesiology?
Anesthesiology is the branch of medical science that deals with the study and
use of anesthetics. It is a medical practice that mainly focuses on pain
relief, stress management, and care of patients who undergo surgery. This
medical specialty has an important role in controlling acute and chronic pains
for both in-hospital and out patients. It is also concerned with managing
patients in intensive and critical care units.
Anesthesiology is important for all surgical procedures, especially when
dealing with cardiac surgeries such as open heart. The patients are given
special care before, during, and after a surgery. Here, the patients are
medically evaluated and prepared before administering anesthetic agents. The
patients are evaluated again after the agents are administered. Further
treatment is done according to the complications that occur because of the
agents or according to the physiological responses with the agents.
The
study of anesthesiology mainly covers two specific areas of medicine. They are
physiology and pharmacology. Physiology deals with the mechanism involved in
the functioning of the biological system. Pharmacology mainly covers the
influence of drugs on these biological systems. These two areas are very
important in anesthesiology,
which makes use of pharmaceuticals to manipulate the patient’s physiology. In
anesthesiology, the surgical and medical conditions with anesthesia are
evaluated. The procedures and problems when administering anesthetic agents
are analyzed.
In the United States,
doctors who have specialization in anesthesiology are called
anesthesiologists. These anesthesiologists can be medical doctors (MD) or
osteopathic physicians (DO). They are highly trained persons with post
graduate education in the form of anesthesiology residency program along with
the basic qualification of a medical doctor. It is the job of a particular
group of nurses and technicians under the guidance of an anesthesiologist to
monitor the vital statistics of the patient every now and then during a
surgery.
