Career Information ~ EVVCOM Anesthesiology Special Interest Group

Why Consider a Career in Anesthesiology?

Anesthesia is an important branch of medicine. Most medical schools do not offer a required anesthesiology rotation. Thus, it is conceivable that one can graduate from medical school never having been exposed to the field. The practice of anesthesiology includes enormous variety, ranging from perioperative and postoperative care of newborn infants to elderly patients, from minor procedures to complex liver transplants and cardiac surgery. Specifically, anesthesiology encompasses perioperative care in its entirety, from deciding if a patient is fit and ready for surgery to treating postoperative pain and determining fitness for discharge. It also often involves providing pain relief for women in labor, being involved in resuscitation, being first responders to traumas, and treating patients with chronic pain. Anesthesiologists work not only in the operating room suite, but also in the delivery room, the emergency department, the intensive care unit, and sometimes they provide sedation for procedures in the x-ray department, the endoscopy suite, and elsewhere in the hospital. Intensivists (a.k.a. Critical Care Medicine Specialists) on the other hand are involved in the day by day care of some of the sickest patients in the hospital, from hemodynamically unstable trauma and burn patients, to septic pediatric patients barely clinging on to life. The practice of Anesthesiology also parallels critical care medicine in terms of job responsibility, since both rely heavily upon modern hemodynamic and invasive monitoring techniques, artificial ventilation, pharmacology, and procedure based medicine. For this reason, it is not uncommon for anesthesiologist to function in both the operating room and the intensive care unit. In light of this, it should be clear to everyone that Anesthesiology requires a high level of technological savvy and expertise, and requires the physician to remain cool and confident under enormous amounts of stress; as the potential for great harm from judgment errors can easily occur.

Anesthesiology is considered to be an acute care specialty. Things change quickly, and treatments work quickly and clearly. Anesthesiologists can change a hurting, anxious, and upset patient into a comfortable semi-relaxed and cooperative patient in only a few minutes. While a family doctor might take weeks to diagnose chronic high blood pressure and months to establish a beneficial treatment regime, anesthesiologists can often diagnose an acute rise in blood pressure within a few heartbeats, and start treatment within minutes.

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