Anesthesia is not an area of medicine most folks profess to understand. As one anesthesiologist put it: "The lay public has the notion that we knock people on the head and they go to sleep, and then we knock them on the head again and they wake up."But today, even doctors are realizing how little they know about the effects of heavy sedation.
Since the beginning of modern medicine, doctors who administer anesthesia have largely confined their worries to the period beginning when patients are sedated and ending when they're fully awakened. Now, two startling studies suggest that the effects of anesthesia linger for a year or longer, increasing the risk of death long after the surgery is over and the obvious wounds have healed.
