HIGH-RISK ANESTHESIA

WHEN THE AIRWAY IS FAILING, THE PRESSURE IS CRASHING, AND THE PATIENT IS ALREADY ON THE TABLE, WHAT IS YOUR NEXT MOVE?

That moment defines high-risk anesthesia, and High-Risk Anesthesia: Principles, Practice and Patient Safety was written to answer it.

This illustrated clinical guide is built for the physician who cannot afford hesitation. It takes you from the preoperative assessment of the most complex surgical patients through intraoperative crisis management and into postoperative care. Every chapter is organized around one question: what should I do now, and why?

What You Will Master

• Complex Surgical Patients: Risk stratification and perioperative optimization for cardiac, pulmonary, renal, hepatic, neurologic, obese, elderly, and obstetric patients, so you can anticipate problems before induction.
• Hemodynamic Instability: A clear, stepwise approach to hypotension, shock, arrhythmias, massive hemorrhage, and vasoactive drug selection, with the physiology that explains each decision.
• Airway Emergencies: Difficult airway algorithms, failed intubation and rescue strategies, aspiration, laryngospasm, and "cannot intubate, cannot oxygenate" scenarios, with the sequencing that protects the patient.
• Perioperative Care: Monitoring, fluid and blood management, pain control, and recovery planning that carry the patient safely beyond the operating room.
• Patient Safety: Crisis resource management, team communication, checklists, and error prevention, drawn from the principles that reduce harm in real practice.

• Rich clinical illustrations, algorithms, and visual summaries that turn complex physiology into rapid, usable knowledge
• A clinical reasoning approach that builds judgment, not rote memorization
• Practical, bedside-ready guidance written for the realities of high-acuity anesthesia

• Anesthesiologists, anesthesiology residents and fellows, CRNAs, critical care physicians, emergency physicians, surgeons, and every clinician who shares responsibility for patients at the edge of physiologic reserve.