I learned about this recently, myself, and was surprised and ended up looking into it.
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.
Long ago I learned that anesthesiologists make more money than devs when starting out. Not a lot more, but most medical professionals do not.
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.
> Experienced doctors, yes. Though I’m hearing some ridiculous salaries in SF.
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.
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).
I thought the duration-related risk for that kind of surgery was based on how long the patient is put on a heart and lung machine? Naively I'd expect that to be riskier than the anesthesia.
That's a different specialty - perfusionist. Most surgeries with general anesthesia don't require a heart and lung machine and anesthesiologists aren't trained to operate one.
I do know all that, but it still doesn’t really seem enough to qualify them as the most important person. Sure, they have the biggest power of veto, but without the surgeon, there is no surgery at all.
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.)
> I do know all that, but it still doesn’t really seem enough to qualify them as the most important person.
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.
this line of thinking is flawed - remove this tiny resistor from the motherboard and the computer will not boot -> this proves this tiny resistor is as important as the CPU.
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.