Loading...It’s very likely that we’ve all been under anesthesia at least once in your life, most likely for an operation of some kind. Since it’s introduction hundreds of years ago, anesthesia has drastically changed the medical landscape, allowing for doctors to perform surgeries that would frankly be too traumatizing for anyone to withstand awake. As you can imagine, this allowed doctors to create surgeries that could treat a wider variety of problems easier and better, and made things much better for the patients receiving the surgery as well. But, something most of us don’t know is how exactly anesthesia works in the first place. It’s not some miracle drug that magically makes us go unconscious, not feel pain, and temporarily become paralyzed; it has a large scientific backing, most of us just don’t know how it works.
In this video by TED-Ed, you’ll learn all about how anesthesia works, how it came to be such a staple of modern medicine, and what it actually consists of. While the specifics of anesthesia are pretty complex and involve a large knowledge of chemistry and science, the video does a great job of simplifying it but still giving an interesting explanation for the common treatment.