The lat­est issue of Scientific American con­tains an arti­cle about the sci­ence of anes­the­si­ol­o­gy, not­ing that ​“the med­ical spe­cial­ty of anes­the­si­ol­o­gy has evolved into a sophis­ti­cat­ed art form.” The mag­a­zine reports that the sci­en­tif­ic under­stand­ing of how anes­thet­ic drugs actu­al­ly work and how to make them bet­ter has lagged behind most oth­er areas of drug devel­op­ment, a short­com­ing that has result­ed in safe­ty con­cerns. Episodes of aware­ness dur­ing oper­a­tions while under gen­er­al anes­the­sia, even when admin­is­tered by trained pro­fes­sion­als, are report­ed by one or two of every 1,000 patients. The arti­cle notes that today’s gen­er­al anes­thesics have a ​“fair­ly nar­row mar­gin of safe­ty, which is the dif­fer­ence between the ther­a­peu­tic dose and a dose that is tox­ic, even lethal.”
(B. Orser, ​“Lifting the Fog Around Anesthesia,” Scientific American, June 2007).

Although the above arti­cle does not men­tion the death penal­ty, con­cerns about the effi­ca­cy and appli­ca­tion of the anes­thet­ic drug used in lethal injec­tions have result­ed in con­sti­tu­tion­al chal­lenges in many states recent­ly. The anes­the­sia is gen­er­al­ly applied by cor­rec­tion­al offi­cers and the lev­el of con­scious­ness of the inmate is mon­i­tored by non-med­ical per­son­nel. See Lethal Injection.

Citation Guide