Comment by hamoid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hamoid | Hacker News Reader

From the name, I used to think that anesthesiologists just "put people to sleep" or stopped patient's pain.

My view is now different. Their job (for what I'm told) is also to keep people alive and stable. They administer drugs and employ machines and techniques to control body temperature, blood pressure, oxygen levels, heart rate and others. Sometimes it's a simple colonoscopy (like in the article), but other times they are treating people who just had a stroke or a bad accident. They have to react in seconds to the response they SEE on the patient (data coming from machines, but also body movement, change in skin color, eye movement, bleeding, and many subtle changes), connecting knowledge and years of experience. It's also an art to be able to put tubes and needles on all kinds of "strangely" shaped bodies (specially in old people).

A more precise title would be "new machine could one day replace some anesthesiologists". I think it's going to take a while before we can trust machines to keep us alive during emergencies and operations.

My mother was a nurse anesthetist like Bill Clinton's mother, and she had some horror stories that some of her colleagues had experienced, like a child who hid some gum under his tongue who then required some furious suctioning after being put under and it migrating to his airway. Add the providing comfort function that gokhan mentions and that I remember from when my tonsils and adenoids were removed in the late '60s when I was in first grade, or that my brother mentioned from surgery in the last decade or so, and it's clear there will still be a human involved even if a machine takes over some functions.

ADDED: your impression of what they do, their focus on a patients vital signs, easily measurable or subtle, their focus on keeping the patient alive, is correct as I understand it from my mother.

My sister is an anesthesiologists. She sometimes anesthetize heart or brain surgery patients without putting them to sleep, because they're too old or unhealthy but need the surgery asap. These people normally cannot come back to life from anesthesia, which is just making someone dead by stopping heartbeat and respiratory functions with anesthetic agents and then animating them with machines. So the creepy state of having your heart worked out while you're awake. I believe this is something that can be fully automated by a machine in the future.

But she also holds the hand of a child to calm her while preparing her to a scary surgery, or talks to relatives waiting outside of intensive care, sometimes tells people that they lost their loved one, or a miracle just happened and they're good.

>These people normally cannot come back to life from anesthesia, which is just making someone dead by stopping heartbeat and respiratory functions with anesthetic agents and then animating them with machines.

Hearts do not stop beating during ordinary general anaesthesia.

You're right. My bad.

An even more precise one would be "new machine could one day replace some functions anesthesiologists perform".

Like most of the knowledge worker automations, it is not a matter of completely replacing the worker, but simply assisting him. I always roll my eyes at "the robots are comming for your jobs". If you are a cashier, maybe. A manager? Nope.

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