Predicting the Future

Abstract

Given the diversity of their interests and locations, not surprisingly, our editors provide sometimes common, sometimes dissimilar views of the future of anesthesia. Some opt for a pessimistic view of things to come. They foresee less support for research and clinical enterprises with a resulting decrease in the development of new information and new investigators essential to academia. They believe that fewer (if any) new drugs or devices will appear. Shortages of highly trained professionals and increasing clinical demands (more surgeries in diverse places for sometimes prolonged procedures) will force reliance on less expensive anesthetists with more limited training to give clinical anesthesia to an older, sicker, fatter patient population. To sustain the safety that modern anesthesia has so carefully cultivated will mandate anesthesia dictated by mind-numbing checklists. Adding insult to injury, departments of anesthesia may be subsumed by larger enterprises, the name “anesthesia” sometimes disappearing and programs directed by someone with no immediate expertise in anesthesia. We will lose, or have now lost, control of areas of medicine we developed (e.g., intensive care medicine; management of chronic pain.) This has already occurred in some parts of the world.