- Joined
- Oct 18, 2001
- Messages
- 350
- Reaction score
- 1
Experiences from clerkship:
1. If anesthesia can be compared to flying a plane, then cardiac anesthesia is comparable to being on a wild weasel mission over unfriendly skies.
2. There is often next to no correlation between surgical complexity and anesthetic complexity. Not an absolute, but frequent enough to warrant consideration.
3. Epidurals invariably work best on the nonoperative side.
4. Estimations on closing time are about as accurate as EBL.
5. CRNA's; well, some of anesthesia can be boiled down to skills inherent to critical care nursing, such as titrating catecholamines to achieve desired pre/afterloads. Then again, training a PA to perform cardiac caths does not a cardiologist make. There's a LOT of thinking to this field; it's like emergency medicine to the nth degree sometimes.
6. A CRNA can NOT do everything an anesthesiologist can until he/she can utilize TEE to evaluate valve replacements intraoperatively (among other skills).
7. Nobody seems to understand anesthesia, and it is out of that lack of knowledge that unfair judgments about the specialty are born.
8. I am of the opinion that there hasn't been ANY good research to begin to explain the nature of effect of inhalational agents.
9. Pediatric cases sure make a lot of people nervous.
10. This is one awesome specialty. To fully appreciate its breadth, you must spend some quality time in different subspecialties.
11. When a patient is just that sick, everyone breathes easier with an anesthesiologist in the room 🙂
Would love to hear other insights!
1. If anesthesia can be compared to flying a plane, then cardiac anesthesia is comparable to being on a wild weasel mission over unfriendly skies.
2. There is often next to no correlation between surgical complexity and anesthetic complexity. Not an absolute, but frequent enough to warrant consideration.
3. Epidurals invariably work best on the nonoperative side.
4. Estimations on closing time are about as accurate as EBL.
5. CRNA's; well, some of anesthesia can be boiled down to skills inherent to critical care nursing, such as titrating catecholamines to achieve desired pre/afterloads. Then again, training a PA to perform cardiac caths does not a cardiologist make. There's a LOT of thinking to this field; it's like emergency medicine to the nth degree sometimes.
6. A CRNA can NOT do everything an anesthesiologist can until he/she can utilize TEE to evaluate valve replacements intraoperatively (among other skills).
7. Nobody seems to understand anesthesia, and it is out of that lack of knowledge that unfair judgments about the specialty are born.
8. I am of the opinion that there hasn't been ANY good research to begin to explain the nature of effect of inhalational agents.
9. Pediatric cases sure make a lot of people nervous.
10. This is one awesome specialty. To fully appreciate its breadth, you must spend some quality time in different subspecialties.
11. When a patient is just that sick, everyone breathes easier with an anesthesiologist in the room 🙂
Would love to hear other insights!
