What is Anaesthesia?

The term is applied to medications which can produce anaesthesia, as well as to the whole process that patients undergo when having surgical and other medical procedures. People often describe ‘anaesthesia’ as being ‘put to sleep’. This is not strictly true: in ‘general anaesthesia’, anaesthetists in fact place their patients into a state of carefully controlled unconsciousness so that they will be unaware and not feel pain.