Medical experts are finding that patients regaining consciousness during surgery is happening at an astounding rate of 50 to 100 times a day.
Although these events occur in only 0.1 percent and 0.2 percent of all surgeries, with 21 million operations performed a year, the numbers quickly add up.
According to a recent study, while still paralyzed by the drug and unable to move, patients have reported:
A patient-safety oversight group is attempting to rid this problem by encouraging hospitals to do more to make sure patients do not "come to" during an operation.
Suggestions to prevent this problem include closely monitoring whether a patient's anesthesia is wearing off, requiring hospitals to build awareness in the operating room and using brain monitors, which observe brain-wave levels during an operation.
Until scientists discover a way to properly address this issue, hospitals are urged to inform their patients of the possibility of waking up during surgery. Further, hospitals have been asked to question patients immediately following surgery as to whether or not they woke up during the operation, apologize if it did occur and refer the patient to counseling as a way to ease the stress.
USA Today October 6, 2004
I've said countless times before the health care system, as it stands today, is the absolute best in the entire world for treating acute surgical emergencies. Beyond that, it is an unmitigated failure at treating chronic illness. Arguably, the current health system may be the leading cause of death in this country for allowing, even promoting, so many unnecessary procedures, drugs and problems.
So, this report from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations does not come as a big surprise to me. What I find most unfortunate is the escalating costs of health care and more and more instances popping up like these that only confirm we are not getting what we pay for.
As I wrote in a past newsletter article, health care costs are continually rising. We are currently paying over $1.5 trillion for health care in the United States and that is expected to rise to $3 TRILLION by the end of the decade. This is largely due to the costs of drugs and surgery and a reliance on a medical system that does not treat the cause of disease.
However, one of the most prominent articles on this site is Doctors are the Third Leading Cause of Death. Since 2000 when that article was written, doctors have become the LEADING cause of death in this country.
That's right, not heart disease, not cancer -- doctors.
In all fairness, doctors themselves are not to blame for all of this. The entire modern health care system, however, is to blame for allowing, even promoting, so many unnecessary procedures, drugs and mishaps such as this anesthesia error.
This illustrates precisely why the system is so desperately in need of change, and why facilitating this change is, and will continue to be, such a substantial portion of my vision.
There are still many lessons to be learned before the traditional medical community will be functioning at the level it should be -- a level that addresses the health of a person before they get sick and instills the necessary means to prevent disease, rather than the means to treat disease with drugs and surgery, as the foremost basis of its philosophy.