Smoking and Anesthesia – Marijuana Usage

Transcript

Smokers are more tolerant to pain medication and medications that are used to relax your body during surgery. Pain medication, opioids especially, have their own side effect profile requiring more of these medications, therefore increases the risk of those side effects, which include sedation, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, constipation, physical dependency, tolerance, and respiratory depression. Marijuana especially increases the amount of anesthesia needed to comfortably sedate and / or put a patient under general anesthesia. Increased amount of anesthesia can lead to complications, including decrease in blood pressure, respiratory depression, and delayed awakening after anesthesia.