When I asked why the answer was because it's the most dangerous job there. There's more opportunity to kill a patient with the anesthesia than any other means.
The main reason they don't want you to eat before surgery is that you can regurgitate and damage your lungs. But even if they solved that, the anesthesiologist's job is easier if you're in a fasting state both before and at the end of a surgery.
A quadruple bypass is not dangerous because you're stitching 4 new arteries onto a heart. It's dangerous because it takes so long to stitch 4 new arteries onto the heart that you're running up against the limits of how long you can safely keep someone sedated without causing life threatening complications.
I'm having trouble finding current statistics but at the time I was learning this, a double bypass was many times safer than a quadruple. Articles on bypass surgery understandably focus on the aspects that are within the patient's control.
> Long ago
There is no medical specialty except perhaps pediatrics/geriatrics where the pay will start below $200,000. There is a relatively modest effect of seniority on physician salaries (there is a huge amount of quality control/gatekeeping before one becomes an attending). This is nationwide, not in SF.
Here are data in SF: https://www.doximity.com/reports/physician-compensation-repo...
And another source that reflects, purportedly, the data used in the above: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DL6MT-ZMJ7K/
I'm not a developer but I don't think $300-400,000, normal salaries for fields like inpatient psychiatry or subspecialty medicine, are common for new developers, or even for any developer (vs a manager).
Remove the anæsthetist, and procedure forbids you from continuing. Remove the surgeon, and it’s impossible to continue. … Or remove the patient. I guess the patient is the most important person there after all! (Actually, that does a pretty good job of showing how the entire notion of “most important” may not make sense.)
It's about as reasonable as doing surgery without an anesthesiologist.
The logic is about what is absolutely necessary to achieve what you try to achieve
And without anaesthesiologist there is no surgery at all either for 90% of the cases.
Id rather have a nurse have a go than to do this awake without sedatives, without anyone monitoring me. Just think about this for a second.
A surgeon can perform a procedure on a living patient or a cadaver and whichever is the case, it does not affect their work. An anaesthesiologist is responsible for ensuring the former does not become the latter, excluding catastrophic surgical procedure failure.
> Remove the anæsthetist, and procedure forbids you from continuing. Remove the surgeon, and it’s impossible to continue.
The opposite is the case (see above).
I read that the anesthesiologist is the person responsible for the patient during the surgery.
Apparently their role is:
- Provide continual medical assessment of the patient
- Monitor and control the patient’s vital life functions, including heart rate and rhythm, breathing, blood pressure, body temperature and body fluid balance
- Control the patient’s pain and level of consciousness to make conditions ideal for a safe and successful surgery
The gist I got from the other things I've read is that the anesthesiologist also has the most go/no-go responsibility before and during surgery.
Source: https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/anesthesiology/patient-i...
Edit: I recommend reading more about the anesthesiologist's role. I found it interesting even as an entirely casual observer.