How Do We Monitor Vitals During Anesthesia?

As an oral surgeon, I want to share with you a question I often get asked, “What are you actually monitoring when you do anesthesia? What’s actually going on?” Well, a lot of things are actually going on. What we’re doing is that we’re titrating on certain medication or group of medications to create a result. And how do we know if that result is being achieved? Well, we have to measure things that your body’s doing. We have to measure your heart rate, we have to measure how the electrical activity of your heart’s functioning, we have to measure how well you’re breathing, we have to measure your blood pressure and we have to measure the amount of oxygen that’s actually getting out into your blood and we also have to measure how much co2 your body is creating and blowing off. All of these things together allows us to safely provide anesthesia but also then provides you the right level of anesthesia based on what your specific needs are and we can then adjust and modify accordingly so we can safely take care of you and then make sure that your is as positive as possible.