A few hours in the doctor's office and Susan Pearce would be home by dinner. Her husband says nobody warned them of danger. Deaths from anesthesia in a hospital or outpatient surgical centers are extremely rare. Hosts of specialists are on hand to try to revive patients with problems. But more surgery is moving to private offices, sometimes performed by physicians with little experience in handling powerful sedating drugs and little equipment to save patients who get into trouble, says Dr. John Neeld, president of the American Society of Anesthesiology.
Nobody counts how many deaths or injuries result from office-administered anesthesia.
Experts believe the overall risk is small, considering the number of procedures in doctors' offices. Even when patients pick a skilled surgeon, operating in a private office means there is no backup for the rare patient with problems, says Dr. Charles Cote, a pediatric anesthesiologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It is fairly easy to administer local or regional anesthetics, those shots that numb a few body parts. But more complex surgeries require powerful combinations of sedating drugs, or drugs with obscure effects that take advanced training to master, Neeld said. Versed, a common office sedative, is reversed by the drug flumazenil.