%0 Journal Article
%T Anesthesia and global warming: the real hazards of theoretic science
%A George Mychaskiw II
%J Medical Gas Research
%D 2012
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/2045-9912-2-7
%X "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics".-Leonard H. CourtneyThroughout most of the world, surgical anesthesia is provided by the use of various gasses or vapors. In the late 1800's, this was accomplished by ether, but has now been refined to be through the action of (usually) one of three different pharmaceutical products. These products are liquids that emit a vapor which, when breathed by a patient, produces a state of general anesthesia. The vapor is exhaled essentially unchanged and then vented to the outside atmosphere, usually through the suction system of hospitals. The drugs are commonly termed inhalational anesthetics. Each product has certain distinguishing characteristics that make it more or less appropriate for use in a particular patient, but they all share the qualities of stability and non-flammability. They are all organic compounds containing halogen atoms, such as chlorine and fluorine. All of the inhalational anesthetics absorb infrared light and this property is useful to anesthesia practitioners in their measurement. In the most common way of measuring the concentration of an inhalational anesthetic that a patient is breathing, a beam of infrared light is passed through the gas as it flows from an anesthesia machine. The anesthetic vapor absorbs a certain amount of infrared light and, by measuring the amount absorbed, a concentration can be calculated. Until recently, any environmental consequence of liberation of the inhalational anesthetics was not given much thought, considering their infinitesimally small proportion of the overall atmosphere. That all changed, however, in 2010.In 2010, Dr. Susan Ryan, from the University of California, San Francisco, published an article in the journal Anesthesia and Analgesia, which calculated the potential environmental impact of inhaled anesthetics in the atmosphere, based on extrapolation of their absorbance of infrared light. That is, if an anesthetic absorbs X amount of infra
%U http://www.medicalgasresearch.com/content/2/1/7