81–90 of 387 posts
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True. Lobotomies used to be common practice as well. Even a surgery performed recently, UPPP, for treating sleep apnea is "no longer recommended"... It was only five or ten years ago where they would perform this incredibly invasive surgery, but enough research shows they're not that effective.
What is considered to be the best treatment for apnea these days? Is it ESP, or something else? Besides CPAP of course.
Given that we are actively attempting to deny the fact that fetuses feel pain, are we really that much more civilized? Citation on my claim that there are those who deny that fetuses feel pain: http://www.healthlawpolicy.org/fetal-anesthesia/
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I feel like it's the opposite - that, historically, many people (regardless of profession) always generally assumed that certain living things did not feel pain or otherwise suffer for some definition of suffering. This status quo naturally persisted into the era of science until science demonstrated it to be wrong in this case . Should they have known better, sooner? Obviously - I don't fully comprehend what could l…
"You shouldn't feel bad about eating an octopus alive or boiling a lobster alive. It's tastier and they don't feel pain anyway."
but then these same people, themselves, will suddenly have a cognitive maturity enough to notice things the same way I could my whole life, and then freak out about consuming them!?
I'm dumfounded! When was that the line!? It was only the line because in some cultures the humans were cognitively stunted the whole time!? Can I trust a single thing they say and perceive? Can they even pass the turing test?
It's fucking scary, that this was recognized in 1987. In the 80s and even in the 90s most places did complex operations on newborns without any kind of painkillers -- imagine a heart surgery without painkillers. Not to mention "simple" stuff like circumcision. Also by this time they knew this about animals too. I think people will look at us as barbarians that we ate them when we knew that they feel pain, can sense t…
> imagine a heart surgery without painkillers. I'm not aware of heart surgeries done on infants without painkillers. Do you have any links discussing that?
> Most American hospitals are now believed to give anesthesia for major surgery.
Key words being: most, believed, major, and now.
But also to answer your question:
> In the preface to the book 1000 Doctors Against Vivisection, Hans Ruesch cites the Lancet and Parade Magazine:
>> So the Lancet, Britain's most authoritative medical journal, could report with its usual professional aloofness in its January 31, 1987 issue that at Oxford's John Radcliffe Teaching Hospital eight premature babies had been subjected to open-heart surgery without any anesthesia. The controversy that flared briefly in a few press organs concerned mainly the question as to whether the babies had or had not received painkillers during the operation.
This is, I believe, one of the downsides of empiricism and the fixation on citation rather than observation and reason. The idea that a whole profession came to reject the idea that infants are able to feel pain is astonishing, especially considering anyone who has ever taken care of infants knows that these little human beings react to things which are known to be painful. Babies feeling pain is something that shoul…
I have yet to understand the historical underpinnings of this phenomenon, but as someone who deals with chronic pain, doctors don’t seem to be aware that people feel pain _in general_.
I’m being sort of facetious, but any chronic pain community is full to the brim with stories of various medical professionals being skeptical of patients’ pain reports or treating pain like it’s not a particularly important quality of life concern.
I have my own stories about this, of course, and some of them are pretty horrible.
It doesn’t surprise me, then, that we assumed at some point that infants don’t feel pain: after all, if we don’t take the pain of adult humans seriously, then why would we consider the pain of a creature who cannot even directly complain about it?
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It doesn't even make sense. What would it mean to anthropomorphize a human? It is a given and can't be fairly characterized like that. The only way to characterize it otherwise is to dehumanize.
I guess the word "anthropomorphise" here is conflating many understanding of "human" and humanity. In the same way, is a bunch of cells, an embryon or just a tissue sample, a human? Is an organ a human? Is a developing fetus a human? How many properties do each share with a typical example of a human? There's a spectrum of biological complexity and other attributes we associate with the idea of "human". The question…
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I feel like it's the opposite - that, historically, many people (regardless of profession) always generally assumed that certain living things did not feel pain or otherwise suffer for some definition of suffering. This status quo naturally persisted into the era of science until science demonstrated it to be wrong in this case . Should they have known better, sooner? Obviously - I don't fully comprehend what could l…
"You shouldn't feel bad about eating an octopus alive or boiling a lobster alive. It's tastier and they don't feel pain anyway."
I don’t personally boil lobster alive, but I only place them slightly above plants and bivalves on my personal scale of how bad I feel bad for killing/eating them.
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A miscarriage / stillbirth isn't the same occurence as an intentional abortion, because if you intend to end a fetal life, you must also take care to make sure the ending is humane. People die naturally in ways we would never allow a person to do intentionally (assisted suicide does not mean you get to assist someone to die in any way possible)
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In the case of a dead child, the procedure is an induction that results in a stillbirth. Or, if necessary, a caesarean section. Regardless an abortion is impossible on account of there no longer being an unborn baby in that case.
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A miscarriage / stillbirth isn't the same occurence as an intentional abortion, because if you intend to end a fetal life, you must also take care to make sure the ending is humane. People die naturally in ways we would never allow a person to do intentionally (assisted suicide does not mean you get to assist someone to die in any way possible)
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No they are not. This is simply misinformation. Before Roe v Wade, women regularly had D&Cs for stillbirths or late miscarriages. No one is trying to stop that. This idea only prevails because a large portion of the populace cannot differentiate between a living fetus and a dead one, and assigns the same moral weight to each.
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Some days I think humans are pretty gosh darned sophisticated. Then I remember that it’s still controversial as to whether we should slice off healthy parts from children who cannot possibly consent.
And with all the regulation around healthcare in the US, male genital mutilation is not only perfectly legal, but also legal to be done by some with no medical certifications, outside of a medical setting, and it is legal for them to suck the blood from the mutilated area with their mouth, increasing risk of disease for the infant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohel Can you imagine a new cult starting today that beh…
1) It is absolutely not common practice to allow a mohel to orally suck the blood out of an infant's penis. If it's practiced at all, it is only in extremely fringe groups of Jews, not just orthodox or ultra orthodox but a very small group, truly some hundreds of people, practice it. I don't have the data, probably no one does, but saying Jewish circumcisions involve this would be like suggesting all baptisms look like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFGHerqhSC8 To call metzitzah b'peh common practice, or at all part of ritual circumcision, is an anti-semitic trope. Comparing a key tenet of Judaism to a cult is both simplistic and demeaning.
2) I grappled with the decision to have brises for my sons. I don't think it's possible to know or define how traumatic such a procedure is; is it worse than giving a 6-month old pierced ears? Is it worse than travelling through the birth canal and having your umbilical cord severed? Who knows. As obvious as it may seem, the pain of a bris impossible to gauge. My sons all began crying as soon as their diaper came off, and their crying was no more intense once the cutting occurred. By the way, it's not like they make a dotted line with marker and snip around the foreskin; whatI witnessed involved a metal device (a type of clamp I suppose) that is slid between the shaft and foreskin, and like a modified cigar cutter, the mohel cuts away the foreskin in one motion. There's a lot of discomfort, maybe pain, but as a father of 3, I assure you every doctor's visit and many trips to the park involve similar levels of harm.
3) I realize mohels are not doctors, but there are mohel academies that train and certify these specialists. To say they are not doctors is one thing (and it's true), but to say they are not medically trained is another. They don't go to medical school but they learn about the biology of the procedure, proper methods, proper tools (including sterilization), post-op treatment & care, etc.
It's not an easy topic, but I don't think it should be hard to talk about. Complicated or interesting to describe, maybe hard to judge or rationalize, but let's talk about it openly, let's avoid disparagement, and most of all let's bring some nuance to this conversation.