Is Anesthesia Totally Safe: The Answer Revealed

The medical profession uses anesthesia in different ways. If a doctor wants to numb a particular part of the body, they might give you local anesthetic. However, they might also give you general anesthetic. If you’re having surgery, and the doctor needs to render you unconscious, this usually emerges as the best way to do that.

A medical professional can always administer anesthesia incorrectly, though. Locating a personal injury attorney following an anesthesia mishap then becomes necessary. You can probably sue the person who administered the general anesthesia if you can establish that they didn’t do it properly.

In this article, we’ll address whether anesthesia carries any risk. We’ll also talk about what you can do if a medical professional makes an anesthesia-related mistake that harms you.

What Does General Anesthesia Mean?

First, let’s define general anesthesia to be sure that you know what we mean when we use this term. General anesthesia means a medical professional administered chemicals that rendered you unconscious.

If you’re having surgery, then an anesthesiologist will normally administer general anesthetic because they want you to keep still and calm while the doctor operates. You should feel no pain or discomfort, assuming the anesthesiologist did their job correctly.

You can get anesthetizing drugs either by inhaling them or intravenously. Either way, you should wake up some time later. By then, hopefully the doctor did the surgery and you’re in the recovery phase.

You might start to feel pain as the anesthetizing drugs wear off. You can often use over-the-counter pain meds to help with those feelings.

If you went through major surgery, the doctor might prescribe you some opioids. Doctors prescribe them much less frequently now due to the many addiction issues such drugs cause. However, after a major surgery, over-the-counter drugs might not combat a patient’s pain effectively enough.

Does Any Danger Come with General Anesthesia?

Usually, you can say that general anesthesia comes with very little risk. The chemicals and dose administered shouldn’t do anything permanent. The average person comes out of their medically-induced unconscious state feeling fine.

However, any time you’re intentionally rendering someone unconscious, that does come with at least a bit of a risk element. The overwhelming majority of people who go through this process won’t have any adverse effects. There’s always a slight chance that something could go wrong, though.

What Happens if Something Goes Wrong with General Anesthesia?

If something ever goes wrong with general anesthesia, maybe that’s because the person who received the chemicals had an allergy they didn’t know about before their surgery. They may have a reaction from the meds that they took to put them under.

If so, they will still probably get through the procedure okay. If they’re under a doctor’s care, then the surgical team can usually tell immediately if something goes wrong and make sure the person regains consciousness.

You may also have a situation occasionally where someone dies on the operating table after they get general anesthetic. It is very rare, but maybe the anesthesiologist got the dosage wrong.

If that happens, then that’s a potential medical malpractice lawsuit. It may also become a wrongful death lawsuit that a relative brings. That’s possible if the anesthetic killed a patient and their family feels they can blame the anesthesiologist, surgeon, or maybe the medical facility in which the accident occurred.

What Can You Do if General Anesthetic Harmed You?

Let’s say you got general anesthetic for a surgical procedure, and it harmed you in some way. In the aftermath, you must assess the damage.

If you feel like you might sue the anesthesiologist, surgeon, or someone else, then you will need to go see a personal injury lawyer who knows about these kinds of cases. Ideally, they will have represented individuals in medical malpractice lawsuits in the past.

You can sue the person or entity who you feel did something wrong. However, getting money out of the lawsuit will likely challenge you, your lawyer, and possibly their investigative team as well.

Why Does Getting Money from the Lawsuit Become So Difficult?

With any kind of medical malpractice lawsuit, you have something called the standard of care that often comes up. The standard of care means a level of care that a patient should normally expect to receive when they visit a doctor’s office, clinic, or hospital.

In many surgical procedures, and also in the administration of general anesthetic, the medical profession has standard practices. They exist because an anesthesiologist will probably administer this type of medication several times daily. The surgeon might conduct several surgeries per day as well.

Let’s assume the medical community sets a standard of care that a patient can expect when receiving general anesthetic and going through a surgical procedure. If something goes wrong, you might successfully sue if you claim that the responsible party did not use the normal methodology. Just because you feel that’s the case, though, can you prove it?

The surgeon or anesthesiologist might claim that they followed all the normal procedures, and they couldn’t reasonably expect a harmful outcome. You will need to prove that’s not the case, and that they made an error that harmed you through their negligence or carelessness.

Your lawyer might try to do that by calling expert witnesses to the stand. If they can point to ways the surgical team that worked on you didn’t follow the best practices or didn’t provide you with the standard of care, you might force a settlement offer. If no conclusive evidence exists that indicates the medical staff did something wrong, though, then you might walk away with nothing.

It’s always possible that the doctor or hospital will try to settle, even if it’s not clear they did anything egregiously wrong. They know that the longer they are in court, the more damaging to their reputation it could become.

That’s why many anesthesia-related lawsuits conclude with settlements before they ever get to a jury’s verdict.

Image by Tung Nguyen from Pixabay

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