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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)

#201

Post by Auracle »

jacobolus wrote: post #150
9991 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the paper the parent comment linked used 'thick skin' as a metaphor for pain resistance, not literally deeper epidermis.

I am pretty sure this is literally about skin thickness. Here is the list of false beliefs polled: Blacks age more slowly than whites; Blacks’ nerve endings are less sensitive than whites’; Black people’s blood coagulates more quickly than whites’; Whites have larger brains than blacks; Whites are less susceptible to heart disease than blacks; Blacks are less likely to contract spinal cord diseases; Whites have a bet…

I mean, as you hinted there are at least a few things on that list that are true. We’re in a weird period of time where people are desperate to ignore any differences between races but they absolutely exist as one would expect due to different evolutionary pressures.

I don’t know how you’d go about testing some of those and many shouldn’t matter to doctors, but I personally think the differences between us are fascinating.

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

#202

Post by asdff »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #125
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…

> 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.

At least its changing these days now that THC is increasingly legal. Boomers have proved you can take it for six decades straight and be fine. Pro sports players are using it after getting beat up in games or practices too.

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

#203

Post by bowsamic »

Auracle wrote: post #199
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 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 i…

It’s because they don’t want to admit they don’t know, so it’s easier to blame the patient

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

#204

Post by lmm »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #80
lisper wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair question. And I'm not saying it is wrong, only that it might be. Let me give a slightly less fraught example: we have an instinct to "honor our dead" and not to "desecrate their bodies." Does that make sense? The dead person doesn't care. Does it even make sense to talk about a dead "person"? One might argue that no dead thing can be a person, it's just a (dead) thing that was once a person and still ha…

> Again I have to emphasize: I am not saying this is the case, only that it is a possibility that needs to be taken into account when doing the moral calculus. An important thing to note about babies is that at some point in the past few months they objectively couldn't feel anything, despite having a human body. So the question is when those various things switch over, not if.

> An important thing to note about babies is that at some point in the past few months they objectively couldn't feel anything, despite having a human body.

Is that actually true (if by "human body" you mean a humanoid body, rather than the vacuous-in-this-context sense of a body of a human)? I wouldn't be surprised if the ability to feel developed earlier than the human-like body.

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

#205

Post by kromem »

It's pretty wild seeing experts claiming that AI isn't sentient within a few days of a post lambasting the ethical myopia of experts self-assured about the subjective experience of others.

A little over 35 years ago, you'd have had a room full of experts arguing that babies can't even feel pain.

No matter how much time passes from Socrates' wisest utterance of "I do not think that I know that which I do not know" we still as a society and species overlook the value in being willing to say "I don't know" and in not giving a concrete answer until we do.

Even if I agree that I think it's unlikely that AI is there yet, the degree to which we don't really understand sentience in humans, let alone across the animal kingdom, means 90% of the conversation that was taking place was BS.

I don't know what others necessarily experience, and the more different they are than me right now, the less about their experience I concretely know.

And the reluctance to admit that led to the torture of babies less than half a century ago.

On some topics, we really should be more ready to acknowledge our own ignorance.

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

#206

Post by chroma »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #123
jnovek wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> My state now has a hard 3 day limit and few Dr.s are willing to write even that.

I don’t mean to de-anonymize you, but what state is this? I know state laws vary, but I haven’t heard of anything close to those sorts of restrictions.

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

#207

Post by Dylan16807 »

lmm wrote: post #204
Dylan16807 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again I have to emphasize: I am not saying this is the case, only that it is a possibility that needs to be taken into account when doing the moral calculus. An important thing to note about babies is that at some point in the past few months they objectively couldn't feel anything, despite having a human body. So the question is when those various things switch over, not if.

> An important thing to note about babies is that at some point in the past few months they objectively couldn't feel anything, despite having a human body. Is that actually true (if by "human body" you mean a humanoid body, rather than the vacuous-in-this-context sense of a body of a human)? I wouldn't be surprised if the ability to feel developed earlier than the human-like body.

I mean it's the same body they have later, and it's made of human cells.

Maybe it looked like a fish at the time, I wasn't trying to be specific in that way.

There's a very good chance 'humanoid' comes before 'feeling' but I don't want to get too deep into the weeds.

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

#208

Post by xdennis »

dane-pgp wrote: post #19
sydd wrote: post #6

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…

> Not to mention "simple" stuff like circumcision. You might have stumbled upon the real reason for this seemingly inexplicable delay in accepting that infants can feel pain: The circumcision industry. Presumably some doctors feared that parents would think twice about it if they knew that their son would be in agony (or need expensive painkillers) when undergoing that elective surgery. https://www.endalldisease.com/…

> undergoing that elective surgery

It's not elective. No infant has ever chosen to remove healthy body parts.

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

#209

Post by mikebenfield »

tsol wrote: post #177
causality0 wrote: post #165

Most people are familiar with the sound of a baby crying, and they think that's the worst sound a baby makes. It isn't. A normal baby's cry sounds absolutely nothing like a baby screaming in agony, which is a fact I discovered the first (and last) time I saw a video of a circumcision. Today we look back and can't imagine how people of centuries ago saw things like slavery and religious oppression as normal. Sometimes…

Quoted post unavailable.

Yeah, after all, as everyone knows, it's not possible to care about both climate change and mutilating babies.

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

#210

Post by xdennis »

tsol wrote: post #174
natroniks wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a circumcised male who has decided to have all 3 male children circumcised. As a Jew, if I may weigh on this, you have my background for an conflicts or biases. Also, maybe content warning is in order for genital mutiliation. 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…

It's sad you have to explain all of this. For some reason casual bigotry is now considered acceptable if it's for the sake of what they believe is a good cause. That's a shift I've noticed recently, as a member of a religion that gets a lot of hate. It portends sad things for our society

> casual bigotry is now considered acceptable

It's not bigoted to be against mutilating boys. Don't hide behind religion to justify barbaric practices. Most Americans don't mutilate because of religious reasons.

Somehow we all agree that female mutilation is horrible, but when it comes to boys it's controversial.

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