Sedation Options During an Endoscopy

QUESTION: I am scheduled for an endoscopy soon. Should I be concerned about anesthesia during this procedure?

Answer from Marny Eulberg, MD: Most gastroenterologists technically don’t use anesthesia when they do endoscopies. Instead, they use medications that create “conscious sedation,” which means the patient will not remember what happened, but the patient can still respond to commands such as “turn onto your left side” or “take a deep breath.” This means that the patient will continue to breathe on their own and can swallow and manage their own secretions, which is different than general anesthesia when the patient no longer can breathe on their own or voluntarily swallow. The drugs that are used also have their effect for a very short time (minutes) and then begin to wear off. Most polio survivors other than those with very limited respiratory function do not need any special modification to the drugs used during
the procedure(s).

Some gastroenterologists do have an anesthesiologist or nurse anesthetist choose which drugs to use, administer them, and then monitor the patient during the procedure. The advantage to this is that the anesthesiologist/nurse anesthetist can direct all of their attention to you and how you are responding to the medication whereas if the gastroenterologist is supervising the sedation, they also need to con-centrate on performing the procedure in addition to monitoring the patient’s response to the medications. The disadvantage is that then there is an extra cost for the services of the anesthesia professional.

It may be helpful to choose an appointment early in the day for the procedure so that if it takes you a bit longer to fully wake up after the procedure there is time to allow that before the facility closes for the day.

PHI’s newly updated Handbook does have a section discussing anesthesia considerations for polio survivors. You can access it at www.post-polio.org.

Post-Polio Health (Vol. 42, No. 2, Spring 2026)