Re:Waking Up During Surgery (2019)
by DHPersonal on Thursday April 22, 2021 @09:25AM
(#26902454)
I recall hearing about this phenomenon about a decade ago, and at the time someone theorized that the specific memory may be lost but the effects were still present, and that these effects could cause general anxiety and distress without the person understanding the reasoning. I think it is perhaps more philosophical than rational, but it did give me pause to consider that perhaps not everyone forgets enough of a surgery to escape its effects, even in the best of circumstances.
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Re:Waking Up During Surgery (2019)
by jeffreyrogers on Thursday April 22, 2021 @11:31AM
(#26903886)
Yeah, they've done experiments with patients with no long-term memory where they do things like shock them when they shake hands. People develop an aversion to it but can't explain why.
Re:Waking Up During Surgery (2019)
by PragmaticPulp on Thursday April 22, 2021 @01:23PM
(#26905321)
There are entire fields of study dedicated to studying the long-term effects of various trauma. Unfortunately it gets mixed in with the "repressed memories" and other pseudoscience ideas, so the pop-science news articles are not good sources of information.
That said, memory repression isn't the only type of anesthesia involved in these procedures. Patients are given multiple medications, which do everything from dampen the pain signals to relax the patient.
It's not equivalent to just forgetting the pain stimulus. The pain stimulus is massively reduced, even if it were to break through to the patient's awareness.
Apparently upper GI endoscopy procedures are conducted under very very mild sedation, I believe typically using propofol.
The most recent one I got, I had disturbing hazy dreams the next two nights where I was conscious of the scope down my esophagus. I would not be surprised if it was less dream and more of a memory fragment.