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
What a lot of these comments do is heavily focus on the drugs but there’s a lot of other stuff going on. Breathing, heart rate, blood pressure. Your body is being sliced up, the anesthesiologist not only ensures you don’t feel it, they also ensure you don’t die from it.
most money in medicine is in surgery. Anesthesia makes lots of surgery possible (plus most run or supervise multiple rooms w/ CRNA or AA in room).
That said, I think it’s insane when they make more for a surgery than the surgeon, but it’s an artifact for the archaic RUC RVU calculation system we have
Just to add to all these wonderful comments: critical care medicine and the intensive care unit (ICU) were modeled after anesthesia, and not internal medicine (as i used to think).
When you’re hospitalized, the nurses and doctors usually check your vitals at a regular interval. If you’re fairly healthy, they’ll check on you maybe once every 4 or 8 hours. If you just got out of operation or are somewhat sketchy, they’ll check on you hourly. If you’re really unstable, they might check on you every 15 minutes. Anesthesia will check on your blood pressure every 5 minutes at minimum, they have you continuously hooked to an ecg and pulse oximeter and even if they aren’t looking at the monitor, they can tell by the pitch and frequency of beeps if you’re getting enough oxygen or if your heart is being erratically.
I mean, if you want, we can do the Howard, Fine, and Howard method. Puts you right out, but you may have a skull fracture, concussion, and some brain bleeding.
Read through a few answers – there is a lot that CAN go wrong, and because of that they often have higher liability insurance costs than everyone else in the room.
There is a difference between “what they get paid” and what the cost in the process – so it is helpful to consider what point of their revenue you are considering.
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