Dr. Alopi (Alopi Patel)

You just don't feel it as much.

If there's significant enough pain, you can definitely feel it, but you won't recall it.

And that's another important aspect of anesthesia, right?

So there's anesthesia, which is that not feeling sensation, analgesia, which is not feeling pain, muscle relaxation, and then memory loss, right?

So when you have anesthesia, your body is not feeling certain things.

When you have the pain medications, you're creating that pain-free state, right?

muscle relaxation, which is muscle relaxants, and then memory recall.

You're not going to recall anything either.

Yeah, most of the time you won't remember anything.

So we call that recall in anesthesia.

So if we do that recipe just right in the kitchen of the operating room, basically, if we do everything just right, most patients will not remember anything from their anesthetic.

How is anesthesia different from sleep?

So that's a great question.

Sleep has its own sort of neurochemistry and physiology, and there are REM waves associated with it.

You can have dreaming associated with sleep.

But anesthesia, you can sleep for five minutes and feel like you've got the most restful sleep.

But you didn't actually go into REM sleep.

It's more of like this state of unconsciousness and you might feel relaxed.

But it is different than true sleep.

You're not having the same brainwave changes and you're not necessarily having the same dreams that you would under natural sleep state.