Tell Your Anesthetist If You Smoke Weed
It’s okay to tell little white lies to your friends and family. Many of us lie to ourselves all the time . But there is one person on this earth with whom you must be 100% honest: your anesthesiologist.
Before you even get to the surgeon, you put your life in the hands of anesthesiologists. They will use a complex cocktail of chemicals to bring you to the brink of death, and then again, as if nothing had happened. If you do your own brain chemistry experiments, their calculations will be wrong.
As Sheila Love recently reported in Vice , Colorado researchers have found that people who regularly use cannabis require higher doses of sedatives than people who don’t. You don’t want to stay awake despite dose after dose. In extreme cases, it may be necessary to cancel the procedure because it is not safe to give you such high doses. On the other hand, cannabis can enhance the effects of anesthetics – for example, it can depress your cardiorespiratory system , which means it can be dangerous to combine with anesthetics that do the same.
Your anesthetist can often safely adjust your dosage if you’re honest, but he’d also prefer you to stop using cannabis in the days leading up to your procedure . (You should still tell them you’ve used it in the past.)
This warning isn’t just about cannabis. Be honest about any substance you have recently or routinely used, because cannabis is not the only thing that can affect how your body responds to anesthesia (both pain and post-operative pain relievers). If you use opioids , for example, you may need to change your team’s entire pain management plan. Your anesthetist is not going to force you, he just wants you to be safe.