Curare: Encyclopedia II - Curare - Curare and anaesthesia

Curare - Curare and anaesthesia

Muscle relaxants are used in modern anaesthesia for many reasons, such as providing optimal operating conditions and facilitating intubation of the trachea. Before muscle relaxants, anaesthesiologists needed to use larger doses of the anaesthetic agent, such as ether or cyclopropane to achieve these aims. Such deep anaesthesia risked killing patients that were elderly or had heart conditions.

On January 23, 1942, Dr. Harold Griffith and Dr. Enid Johnson gave a synthetic preparation of curare (Intracostin) to a patient undergoing an appendectomy (to supplement conventional anaesthesia) and obtained a safe, short-term, local relaxation of the muscles. After using the same technique in 25 more cases, Dr. Griffith published a paper recommending the use of Intracostin in many kinds of surgery. By 1945, Intracostin was being used in more than ten thousand operations per month. Modern anaesthetists have at their disposal a variety of muscle relaxants for use as a standard component of anaesthesia.

The ability to produce muscle relaxation independently from anaesthesia has permitted anaesthesiologists to adjust the two effects as needed to ensure that their patients are safely unconscious and sufficiently relaxed to permit surgery. However, it has also made possible anaesthesia awareness, a case where through error or accident a patient remains fully conscious and sensitive to pain but cannot move to indicate this during the surgery.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Curare and anaesthesia", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki