Anesthesia, long considered a blessing to patients and surgeons, has been a mystery for much of its 160-plus-year history in the operating room. No one could figure out how these drugs interact with ...

‌Local anesthesia numbs a part of your body so that your doctor can stitch up a wound or take a biopsy without you feeling any pain. Unlike general anesthesia, where you are put to sleep during a ...

Within a few years after their introduction into widespread clinical use, three major classes of inhaled anesthetics were used: hydrocarbons, ethers, and other (non–carbon-based) gases. Nitrous oxide ...

Mutated variants of a particular ion channel cause difficult-to-treat epilepsy. A study published in the journal Nature now shows that a commonly used anesthetic drug, propofol, can restore the ...

The activity of ion channel proteins that are important for cell-to-cell communication is markedly reduced during anesthesia, according to researchers, helping to explain how anesthesia works.