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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)

#191

Post by mrtweetyhack »

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#192

Post by kqr »

mcswell wrote: post #164
rootusrootus wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've met damn few people on the pro-choice side who were pro-abortion, no matter how you'd like to frame it. We just don't trust the government to be involved in this very personal decision.

I would view such pro-choice people as making the same mistake that anesthesiologists once made about infants: if you can't hear the unborn complain, they must not be complaining. Therefore it's a personal decision of the mother, because you can hear her complain. The opposite side of this debate is that maybe the unborn do complain, even if we can't hear them. And it's our moral obligation to stand up for them, beca…

I've never engaged in this debate before but I'll try this once. We'll see if I regret it.

From what I understand, abortions happen. Period. People get rid of unwanted children before they are viable. The question is not whether or not this should happen, because it will happen -- it happens all the time, even when it's strictly illegal with severe punishment. It's a tragedy, but it happens a lot and apparently we can't control it.

The question is whether -- once it happens -- we want it to be safe, above board, with medical professionals informed. Or if we want it to happen in a moldy basement with a coat hanger, at significant risk to the woman involved.

What's your take on this?

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

#193

Post by thoms_a »

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 can think of one "routine" prophylactic amputation that was and is still performed with no anesthesia on newborn male infants.

The Hippocratic oath really does seem like a marketing gimmick in light of many such facts about modern medical practice.

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

#194

Post by bscphil »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #29
happytoexplain wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can see this all the time right now. People always talk about dogs as though they are philosophical zombies that merely learned to imitate the emotional displays we see from them. I see people talking about animals frequently caveat their intuition by saying things like "I'm sure he's just learned that if he does that he'll get food" or the like. But the notion that fellow mammals which evolved to live in social…

I see those as two basically different phenomena:

1. Is X capable of feeling pain / sentient?

2. Is X capable of having emotions?

It seems probable that (1) is a precondition of (2), such that we should not be surprised if there are sentient creatures (perhaps including dogs) that are capable of feeling pain, are intelligent, and able to produce apparently emotional displays without having evolved the underlying experience of emotion.

Human emotions are complex and came about as the result of a long period of evolution with an intricate social system built on top of it. The emotions that e.g. dogs show are the result of a few-thousand year history of humans selectively rewarding a particular animal for displaying a certain behavior.

It is, IMO, beyond the pale to suggest that animals like dogs don't experience pain or have subjective experience. (And the same goes for pigs, cows, and most other vertebrates.) That would come as a surprise to some rather intelligent historical figures like Descartes. I don't think it's similarly strange to think that these animals don't experience emotions in quite the same way we do, or that an apparent display of "sorrow" doesn't map 1:1 to an internal experience of sorrow in the way we might expect.

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

#195

Post by pessimizer »

jacobolus wrote: post #143
9991 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? Is it true?

From a brief skim of the literature, the main difference seems to be that darker skin is better protected against aging effects from sun exposure, and better maintains its elasticity (etc.) when exposed to ultraviolet radiation over decades. But less research than might be expected has been done about other differences between the skin of different groups. * * * > There exists substantial evidence to support that Bla…

So according to the second paper, maybe?

> the thickness of the dermal–epidermal junction (DEJ) [...] was higher in African Americans than in Caucasians.

There are traits that tend to travel next to each other for historical reasons, as well as because they physically are controlled by the same genes. It's important to pay attention to them; one of the facts that really wrecked the reputation of Kim's Convenience (an anodyne Canadian show I've never watched) was that they gave one of the Korean main characters multiple sclerosis, and Koreans almost never get multiple sclerosis. It made the actress playing the character hate the show.

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

#196

Post by rscho »

bad416f1f5a2 wrote: post #63
Spoom wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the impression that a lot of gynecological care is in the same realm, but I don't have the equipment to have first hand anecdotal evidence. Heard many a horror story about IUD placement / removal, where folks were told that a Tylenol would be enough.

Medical racism and sexism are very real. One in four residents believe blacks have thicker skin than whites: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1516047113

Common layman prejudice aside, it's more likely experience from people placing iv lines regularly. Black skin is more difficult for many reasons, and I can easily believe that many get the impression of thicker skin because of other associated factors.

Black people really do have black skin, you know? It's not all racism...

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

#197

Post by rscho »

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?

Culturally speaking, this is a very narrow-minded interpretation.

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

#198

Post by bscphil »

antognini wrote: post #189
mcswell wrote: post #167

While I view the modern approach--give the infant some anesthetic--as best, here is another thought about not being able to remember the pain afterwards (reportedly babies that were operated on without anesthesia have no memory of it, even years later). I have had several colonoscopies, dating back 20 years or more. (Yes, I am that old, and get off my lawn.) For the first couple, I remember it as at best uncomfortabl…

My dad is an anesthesiologist and I've heard similar things from him. Anesthetics have three goals: 1. Elimination of pain; 2. Loss of consciousness; 3. Loss of memory. Of these, he was saying that the most important is the last. If you have no memory of the pain, in some sense it didn't really happen. It does sort of make sense that they are okay with the patient experiencing some pain because anesthetics (at least…

> Of these, he was saying that the most important is the last. If you have no memory of the pain, in some sense it didn't really happen.

That strikes me as a very strange thing to think. When I am dead, I will have no memory of anything. I should not conclude on this basis that any pain I have during my lifetime "didn't really happen", or doesn't matter. On the contrary, it seems like the only thing that could matter is the pain I actually do feel, for as long as I feel it. Of course, given the choice, it would probably be preferable to not have to remember the pain later, but I wouldn't call the gap between the two an enormous one.

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

#199

Post by Auracle »

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…

The same goes for fatigue or anything else they can’t actually test for. I would guess it mostly stems from them not having a way to objectively judge it. My pain tolerance is way higher than my wife’s, in part because I suffer from cluster headaches. 8/10 for me might be a broken bone. For her it might be a relatively superficial cut.

So what’s a doctor supposed to do when someone says something really hurts? Hell if I know.

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