How Inhaled Anesthetics Work on the Body

The miracles of modern medicine allow doctors to fix problems in the human body that their predecessors couldn’t even diagnose. The rapidly growing field of medical technology continues to eradicate threats to human life at every turn, but one of the most important leaps forward in medicine has been anesthesia’s ability to keep patients comfortable during difficult procedures.

Today, there are many different types of anesthetics available to doctors. They can be injected, applied topically, or even inhaled by the patient. How inhaled anesthetics do their job stays the same, but which chemicals are used and what procedures they are used for change frequently.

A Brief History of Inhaled Anesthetics

As little as one hundred years ago, reliable anesthetics were hard to come by. Many different ancient cultures experimented with powerful narcotics in order to relieve human suffering, but early attempts at administering these remedies often went awry. Laughing gas, an anesthetic regularly used in dentistry, was not discovered until 1775 and was not put into regular medical use until the 1840s. Other medical professionals would experiment with other inhalants like chloroform and ether throughout the nineteenth century.

Common Inhaled Anesthetics

Nitrous oxide, diethyl ether, and chloroform were among the first and most commonly used anesthetics. The latter two eventually fell out of use because of adverse side effects. Laughing gas is still in regular use as an anesthetic for dentists because it sufficiently numbs without causing one to lose consciousness. This is important in dentistry because the dentist often needs to speak to his or her patient.

Most other inhaled anesthetics used today render the patient unconscious. This is called general anesthesia and considered the best option to long or intricate surgeries. Fluorochemicals are uniquely suited to being general anesthetics because they can easily be turned into vapor and are nonflammable. Many of these fluorochemicals are used in conjunction with each other in order to create effective anesthesia:

• Sevoflurane


• Desflurane


• Isoflurane


• Enflurane


• Halothane

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About Author:
Stephanie Larkin is a freelance writer who writes about issues and topics pertaining to the use of chemicals such as Anesthetics

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