Q. Is anesthesia like a coma?
A. It’s a reversible drug-induced coma, to simplify. As with a coma that’s the result of a brain injury, the patient is unconscious, insensitive to pain, cannot move or remember. However, with anesthesia, once the drugs wear off, the coma wears off.
**This question and answer is taken from an interview of Dr. Emery Neal Brown, Professor of anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School, a professor of computational neuroscience at M.I.T. and a practicing physician in the NYT. Do click through to read more of the interview.**
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/science/01conv.html
