I’m not saying they don’t deserve it, obviously I know they have our lives between their hands. To my knowledge, they base their calculations around our weights and heights. What else makes it so difficult?
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it is not that anaesthesiology is so difficult that it needs extraorbitant salaries (not more difficult than other specialties), it is more a result of supply and demand. if there isn’t enough specialist, then the ones around can ask for practically any cost (since surgery cannot be done without them), then the good money brings more young fellows to anaesthesia and then you have a truckload of people earning a lot
It’s not just a simple size calculation, they monitor the patient throughout and adjust doses as needed.
Another thing is that because they often cause you to stop breathing they do a ton of airway management. It’s incredibly important obviously but also comes with some liability as poor technique can result in damage to your teeth. Dental damage like a chipped tooth doesn’t heal and people don’t like that.
They’ll meet you before surgery, go over your history to decide on the right drugs, execute their plan correctly keeping unaware of the unimaginable pain and keep you alive during that hopefully without causing permanent damage.
High skill high risk work with lives on the line. A bad job can result in death or permanent disability. All doctors make good money of course for similar reasons but this type gives you what is sort of a controlled overdose and keeps you from dying as long as needed.
Lots of risk is involved in sedating someone. Height, weight, age, sex, muscle mass, duration of surgery all take into account when putting them under. A mess up there can lead to major law suits (death or malpractice). So these guys have to be extremely precise with their calculations.
They’re constantly doing complex algorithmic equations in their heads, synthesizing information from monitors to then make decisions, it isn’t just height and weight.
I had to put together a presentation for a radiologist explaining why creating a machine learning model to do these calculations would be an incredible advancement and when talking to radiologists, learned exactly how much calculating they’re really doing and it’s well beyond what you’re assuming.
Do you want to be asleep enough to not feel your body getting sliced open, but not *so* asleep that you’re dead? And do you want that to happen on the exact time scale your surgical team wants, with little to no side effects afterwards?
A family member is a doctor, and told me a story about how on a surgical rotation during residency the surgeon was asked how long he wanted the patient out. He said, “45 or 50 minutes”, to which the anesthesiologist said “Well which is it?”
They have crazy control over you and use very precise dosages of some really funky stuff to make your procedure safe.
You are thinking that an anesthesiologist puts you to sleep. Thats not quite right. They make you almost dead, but not completely. It takes precision to keep you on that knifes edge without going over. They get paid alot because it takes lot of study to do that with a variety of people with different underlying health conditions
No, it’s not just height and weight. That’s the absolute basic. Some other things an anaesthetist (UK term) has to know include:
– How the machines they’re using work. When I helped an ex go through some of their exams they had to have circuits memorised.
– A huge range of drug interactions. Any medicine you’re taking (prescription, over the counter, or illegal) can interact with the anaesthetic drugs. If the anaesthetic is disrupted bad things can happen including death.
– Other chemicals or hormones that might impact the anaesthetic.
– What to do if a patient has an allergic reaction.
– How to maintain an anaesthetic. Some surgeries go on for hours so the patient has to remain under enough not to feel anything but not so much they overdosed. Anaesthetists have to be able monitor throughout and adjust accordingly.
It all adds up to is a huge amount of risk that they have to assess, sometimes very quickly. If they get it wrong it’s very possible a patient dies on the table. That’s why they get paid so much.
Knowing the anesthesia formula is the job yes, but knowing what to do when things go wrong and still keep us alive and not brain dead, that’s what they learn and get paid for.
Because surgeons would be (nearly) useless without them.
I went under the knife a week ago to have plates put in my broken wrist, they did a nerve block on the whole arm, then put me under general anesthesia.
2 hours later I was awake, alert, and in no pain after having my wrist filleted open and rearranged with two plates and 12 screws. Two days after that I was off the narcotic painkillers and only taking Motrin and Tylenol Arthritis.
The surgeon was amazing, but the anesthesiologist is what makes them able to perform these surgeries safely and with far fewer complications.
Anesthesiologist/CRNA are the angel on your shoulder, keeping you one step in death door and one step outside.
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