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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Or nurse-anesthetist (note that there are several other methods for safely and effectively maintaining anesthesia). Barbiturates are used only for induction of anesthesia and although these drugs rapidly and reliably induce anesthesia, wear off quickly. A neuromuscular-blocking drug may then be given to cause paralysis which facilitates intubation, although this is not always required. The anesthesiologist or nurse-anesthetist is responsible for ensuring that the maintenance technique (typically inhalational) is started soon after induction to prevent the patient from waking up.General anesthesia is not maintained with barbiturate drugs because they are so short-acting. An induction dose of thiopental wears off after a few minutes because the thiopental redistributes from the brain to the rest of the body very quickly. Also thiopental has a long half-life and needs time for the drug to be eliminated from the body. If a very large initial dose is given, little or no redistribution takes place because the body is saturated with the drug; thus recovery of consciousness requires the drug to be eliminated from the body. Because this process is not only slow (taking many hours or days), but also unpredictable in duration, barbiturates are unsatisfactory for the maintenance of anesthesia.Thiopental has a half-life around 11.5 hours (but the action of a single dose is terminated within a few minutes by redistribution of the drug from the brain to peripheral tissues) and the long-acting barbiturate phenobarbital has a half-life around 4–5 days. In contrast, the inhaled anesthetics have extremely short half-lives and allow the patient to wake up rapidly and predictably after surgery.The average time to death once a lethal-injection protocol has been started is about 7–11 minutes.[105] Because it takes only about 30 seconds for the thiopental to induce anesthesia, 30–45 seconds for the pancuronium to cause paralysis, and about 30 seconds for the
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