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?
In: Biology
As a doctor in a different field, I can at least say it’s a fine line between putting you under and putting you too far under and it’s a lot harder than it looks to stay between those two lines. Then there’s keeping you alive and bringing you back when the unexpected happens as well. They earn what they get paid for all that alone.
Controlled death, they litterally are on the hook if something somehow goes wrong. Also they’re doctors.
So many departments in a hospital can’t do their jobs with anaesthesiologists. Even ones you’d never think of.
Used to drive us mad trying to schedule meetings and even if all the other depts agreed, nothing could go ahead unless anaes said it worked for them.
They’re paid a lot because it takes a lot of training and education to be able to do the job, and because a lot of people who have medical training don’t want to do that job.
I suspect they need to carry a lot of very expensive malpractice insurance, too, and if they weren’t paid a lot, nobody would do that job.
They are the person in the O.R. keeping you alive. Surgeons see you as a piece of meat to go to work on (future well being). Anestheologists and nurse anesthetists keep you alive while your guts are cut open and in probably the craziest state a human body can be in while still considering it to be “alive”. All possible scenarios and issues are the anestheia providers job to manage. THEY order the surgeon to stop for the patients well being. THEY run the show on behalf of you, the patient.
They know so much.
Source: my wife is going on her clinical nurse anesthetist rotations in 3 days.
In addition to what others are saying about they complexity of anesthesiology, I think I read they have some of the highest malpractice insurance rates, which means they are more likely to be subject to lawsuits
Friend of mine who is anesthesiologist mentioned that the challenge comes from experience of working with patients who are on the edge of life and death. And as people here mentioned – a lot of other responsibilities.
Anesthesiologist here.
Another thing I like to point out to people is for a healthy, straight forward patient, for a straight forward surgery you can train even a lay person to perform that anesthesia relatively safely in a couple weeks.
Why you want the 4 years undergrad/4 years med school/4 years anesthesia residency/sometimes an additional year of fellowship training is for when expected or unexpected things happen. The healthiest person for the easiest surgery can have unknown allergies or genetics that could cause serious complications intra-operatively. Surgeries can go wrong. As our population ages many patients have a myriad of co-morbidities. You want someone taking care of you or loved one that knows what to do in these situations. You want somebody that doesn’t expose the patient to unnecessary vascular access/procedures if not needed but knows when it’s required. You want someone that knows when a patient should be undergoing further preoperative testing or intervention. You want someone that has done thousands of procedures and in the beginning even failed at them to know what plan A, B, C, D is in the event of problems.
I had a surgery on my foot a couple years ago. I asked the surgeon if they could just do local anesthesia, not general, so I wouldn’t be out of it for so long. He was fine with it — they just lidocained the crap out of my foot and did the surgery with me fully awake.
The anesthesiologist came with the OR. Even though the surgeon did all the lidocaine, they had the anesthesiologist stick around in case I started freaking out mid-surgery and they had to knock me out. As it was, it was totally fine, and I just spent a pleasant hour chatting with the anesthesiologist about his upcoming vacation to the Rockies while four people took my foot apart and put it back together.
Just to add to what a lot of other people have already said.
An anaesthetists job starts way before you get put under. My department does exercise test prior to major abdominal or thoracic surgery to help in pre-operative planning. Anaesthetists help manage more high-risk patients doing this test and go through the risks of surgery with them, giving them a much better picture of the surgical risks involved in the decision of whether to operate or not.
Suffice to say, they don’t just turn up at the operation with no input beforehand.
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