July 1, 2026 Salus Health Care Forum

Mark

It would be unethical to ever study that. So I think it’s very individualized. In your case, there was definite fear. For mine, there was anger or a disappointment, at least.  As a seven-year-old, that’s kind of a weird sensation to think, oh, I don’t trust anybody now at age seven.

Jeremy

I think people’s attitude towards anesthesia probably is changing, as happens with everything. Because when it originally went from surgery without anesthesia versus with anesthetia,  like a flock of sheep, we all went over to the side of anesthesia. I’m getting this. I would never go back to having an operation without it, although some people do that with acupuncture and other means.

Bill B, you talk about your early childhood experience. A lot of our mothers were put under anesthesia to give birth, called Twilighting. That phenomenon was very popular in the 50s and 60s. I know, for example, my mother was put in that. And I wondered my whole life, and once I became an adult and understood, that may have impacted her and her ability to relate with her children. Because she didn’t go through the whole bonding experience of nursing. They didn’t nurse either. They were sat over and given a bottle. So my whole family might have been impacted. Their relationships were impacted in ways that I don’t think are really well understood. And so I think anesthesia is seen as a common good, which I think it is.

And yet it kind of goes unquestioned wherever somebody thinks to use it.

Jack

I’m curious, for those of you behavioral health folks, about body memories.  I run into these frequently with patients where you put somebody into a particular position while you’re doing a procedure. Or they come into the ER and you manipulate their body, and suddenly they have almost like a PTSD experience. And I wonder, is there any correlation with surgery being an intrusive event. It is. We’re cutting into you. We’re looking at parts that we’re not supposed to look at. We’re manipulating things that should not be manipulated. I wonder if any of those are the cause or associated with later body memories that I’m identifying as a clinician. I’m examining a patient and suddenly somebody gets very uncomfortable or actually starts crying. And I wonder, “what the heck? What just happened?”

Gay

I can speak a bit about this matter of body memories because neurofeedback, which is now more commonplace in the outpatient setting, was researched in The Body Keeps the Score. That book was written by a major trauma therapist. He is the one that uncovered how the body memories, you know, continue to contribute to our neurological and sometimes physiological issues. He studied the work I do—quantitative EEG and neurofeedback and biofeedback—and used these tools on post-war veterans. That was his think tank at the VA. It’s believed with 40, 50 years worth of research that we can reverse the impact of the trauma.