How do anesthetics work?
Good question – we don’t know the details exactly. First of all, we put people to sleep (almost always, but with some exceptions) with a drug called propofol. It is a very short acting sedative/hypnotic, whose mechanism of action is not completely understood. It may exert its primary effect by potentiation of the GABA-A receptor, thereby slowing the channel closing time. Once a patient is asleep, we almost always use inhalation anesthetics to maintain anesthesia. Those include drugs such as sevoflurane, desflurane and isoflurane, which are all halogenated ethers. Here is an explanation from an anesthesiology journal: “Inhaled anesthetics act in different ways at the level of the central nervous system. They may disrupt normal synaptic transmission by interfering with the release of neurotransmitters from presynaptic nerve terminal (enhance or depress excitatory or inhibitory transmission), by altering the re-uptake of neurotransmitters, by changing the binding of neurotransmitters to t
