Anesthesia-intensive care, in synergy with surgery, is evolving towards a new concept: Anesthesia-intensive care-perioperative medicine (ARMPO)

Anaesthesia, long practiced by surgeons, is a technique developed in the middle of the 19th century with first the inhalation of ether, then chloroform and nitrous oxide, allowing the surgeon to perform painless surgery on an immobile patient. The development of new drugs, local anaesthetics, then intravenous ones, powerful and short-acting opioid derivatives, curares, combined with improvements in administration and monitoring equipments, has allowed an increase in safety, and new developments in surgical and anaesthetic modalities and indications. The latter justified the creation of a medical specialty. The adoption of Anaesthesia-Resuscitation-PeriOperative Medicine (ARMPO) has made possible, through a more rational, transversal, and transdisciplinary preoperative and postoperative organization, to reinforce the safety of procedures, to improve patient comfort, to reduce operating constraints and to shorten hospital stays. (c) 2024 l'Academie nationale de medecine. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.