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Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

nytimes.com

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Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#121

Post by daniel-cussen »

So the reason they don't recognize pain in infants is simply that they have no voice or memory. Simple as that. Can't make the doctor feel the pain. Same with psych ward inmates, same as senile people, same as the blind or deaf, same as prison inmates, same as the mentally retarded, same as the very ugly, same as the canceled, same as those needing to protect their privacy (eg HIV or gay), same as the poor, same as the evicted, same as the tortured, same as immigrants.

None of them feel pain. It's like the pain nerves don't extend from outside their body and into doctor's body and manifest as pain in the doctor's nervous system, because when a doctor decides to fuck with eg a senator or CEO, that's different, I've seen that, the doctor recognizes that pain.

Particularly a Silicon Valley moghul who asked for a colon exam and the doctor denied it, meaning he couldn't get it since he didn't have a doctor's permission, meaning he died of colon cancer which went undetected too long, and wrote a book as he was suffering about how much he hated that doctor. That doctor apologized, though really he should have gotten cancer up his own tract as a consequence, let's be honest, that would be justice if GOD carried it out. That moghul should have sued for malpractice, gotten the guy denied from even teaching medical school, end up mopping up at the IHOP that's the afterlife of a callous doctor. Drive a taxi after fucking up, just like everybody else. If that. Beg.

A doctor recognizes pain when it is his own. Empathy or consequences, one of the two.

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#122

Post by notahacker »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #34
BitwiseFool wrote: post #4

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…

We should find sympathy for the doctors here. Administering general anesthesia to a newborn was a terrifying and deadly prospect at the time, so it was much easier to find a way to pretend it was unnecessary - certainly many of these surgeries had to happen one way or another for the baby to survive.

I also suspect that the actual strand of opinion is being fairly uncharitably represented in that article, and the original perception was more along the lines of "they won't feel and process pain quite like adults, and they won't remember it, and they won't develop any pathological fears as a result of it, so anaesthetic is less important as well as riskier", not an assumption babies didn't have senses.

Let's not forget the profession used to perform operations on adults without anaesthetic before they understood safe ways of administering it too.

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#123

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

jnovek wrote: post #112
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse for you is how concerns about fentanyl are now a defacto war on pain relief. States have demonized long lists of pain meds, driving people in chronic pain to buy much riskier drugs on the street (something I witness fairly regularly). States used to blame today's bans on the pill mill problem that was addressed over 20 years ago - but now don't even bother to do that. Now the argument reads like 'because f…

Yes. To make matters worse, the opioid epidemic is real; regardless of the cause, it’s not just war on drugs hysteria. It ends up that opioids are terrible drugs. Aside from the obvious habit forming stuff, there’s things like hyperalgesia and central sensitization — long-term opioid use can screw up how your brain processes pain. I witnessed the decline of opioids in the latter-half of the 2010s firsthand from the p…

> It ends up that opioids are terrible drugs.

Opioids ruin lives. Opioids restore lives. People die from taking them. People are functionally dead when they're unobtainable.

The most false thing about opioids is that they are any one thing.

I've used hydrocodone for months at a time. It's addictive so there are protocols that need to be followed. Stick with the dose and taper when done. However, that was in the past. For severe pain, legal pain relief is no longer available - to me and to millions of others.

My state now has a hard 3 day limit and few Dr.s are willing to write even that. What has become routine everywhere is being Rx'd Tylenol for moderate to severe post-op surgical pain. I personally had to beg for tramadol following abdominal surgery. I recently had to enter into a protracted negotiation with my Dr - again, for tramadol - so I could exercise and get a little more life out of my failing knees.

The pendulum has swung way too far and the number of lives that are being ruined by that is nearly incalculable.

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#124

Post by themitigating »

jnovek wrote: post #85
BitwiseFool wrote: post #4

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…

“Babies feeling pain is something that should be self-evident, shouldn't it?” 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’ pa…

Should knowledge ever be considered self evident especially if it's possible to experiment?

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#125

Post by Wowfunhappy »

jnovek wrote: post #85
BitwiseFool wrote: post #4

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…

“Babies feeling pain is something that should be self-evident, shouldn't it?” 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’ pa…

> as someone who deals with chronic pain, doctors don’t seem to be aware that people feel pain _in general_.

I don't know your situation, but I wonder if it seems this way because doctors don't have many options for treating chronic pain. There are medications for acute pain, but when you use them chronically over many years—well, that's how we ended up with the Opioid epidemic.

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#126

Post by [deleted] »

jnovek wrote: post #85
BitwiseFool wrote: post #4

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…

“Babies feeling pain is something that should be self-evident, shouldn't it?” 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’ pa…

[deleted]

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#127

Post by pwillia7 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #94
jnovek wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Babies feeling pain is something that should be self-evident, shouldn't it?” 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’ pa…

The likelihood of someone understanding something is inversely proportional to the impact on their ability to pay the mortgage. Pain is recognized as “bad” innately. So if you can assert that no pain exists, you’re not accountable for causing, preventing or doing anything about it.

Doctors caring at all about pain is relatively new. When medicine started it was just about keeping you alive not keeping you out of pain.[1]

There is a fantastic book that is half about the history of pain medicine and half about a small region in mexico that distributes a lot of the heroin in the US. Dreamland[2]

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6311547/ [2]:https://www.amazon.com/Dreamland-True-Americas-Opiate-Epidem...

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#128

Post by quantum2021 »

woojoo666 wrote: post #114
qgin wrote: post #46

A history to keep in mind as AI progresses.

Yup, in fact I assumed this article from 1987 surfaced primarily because of the recent firing of the Google employee that claimed that Google's Lambda AI was sentience [1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31716639

And may have alluded to it's own suffering using metaphor during the released conversation re: Les Mis and Fantine.

https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#130

Post by _gabe_ »

lisper wrote: post #48
BitwiseFool wrote: post #4

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…

> Babies feeling pain is something that should be self-evident, shouldn't it? We need to be careful here. Just because a system responds to painful stimulus does not necessarily mean that it "feels pain". Consider this: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/google-places-engine... Or this: https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-people-demanded-privacy-to-con... Or this: https://junkerhq.net/MGS2/MarkIII.html People tend to…

You do know what the definition of anthropomorphize is right?

> attribute human characteristics or behavior to (a god, animal, or object).

As far as I'm aware, baby humans don't start off as non-humans and magically transform into a human at some age where they understand more. So it seems fitting to attribute human characteristics to humans. That is not anthropomorphizing.

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