You are referred a patient who needs urgent surgery and the obstetrician tells you she has some obscure medical condition which you have never heard of before. Does her condition have any implications for the safe conduct of anaesthesia? How can you find out in a timely manner what the specific anaesthetic issues are and what anaesthetics have been used safely by others in these patients before?

Hi everyone,

This week I am joined by Siv and Sarah to discuss this tricky situation and to give a free plug for the website orphananesthesia.eu a site started by the German society of anaesthesiology and now contributed to by anaesthesia providers from all over the world to help with these difficult patients.

Correction: In the podcast we referred to Stoelting's textbook - this text is actually titled "Anesthesia and co-existing disease" - but not dedicated specifically to rare or uncommon disorders. A more relevant text would have been Fleischer et al "Anaesthesia and uncommon diseases".

References

https://www.orphananesthesia.eu/en/