Anesthesia
A Chemistry Lab
What You Need To Know
Anesthetics work by numbing the body to make painful operation painless. When you feel pain the part of your body that is in pain the nerves of that part send pain signals to your brain to signify you are not well. Anesthesia work by blocking the signal from reaching your brain.
What Are Some Problems With Anesthesia?
If taken too much anesthesia a patient could be killed, but if not taken enough anesthesia the patient could wake up during the operation. Also anesthesia causes a build up of stomach acids.
Local and General Anesthesia
General
General anesthesia work by putting the patient into a unconscious state and numbs the body as well. This is used for big operations that would be too painful to do if awake.
Local Vs. General
Local and General anesthesia are very similar yet very different.
Local
Local anesthesia works by numbing only a certain area of the body. This is usually done with a needle. This is used for smaller scale operations such as dental surgeries.
The Lab
What Did We Do?
In the lab we needed to test the percentage of concentration of the water to the green water. The green water represented the anesthesia we needed to decide if the mystery solution was too high concentration.
The Steps
First we made our own mixture. We took 6mL of green liquid and 4mL of water to make a 60% solution. Then we used the colorimeter to determine the concentration of each mixture. Finally we determined the concentration of the mystery mixture and found it had too high of a concentration.