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

nytimes.com

281–290 of 387 posts

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

#281
post #95
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not so simple. Circumcision in neonate males is a medical prophylactic. The evidence for harm is weak as well. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/10/acc-is-infant-circumci...

>medical prophylactic

The whole point of circumcision is to control the actions of the person later in life. This is extremely harmful, as you are removing another individual's agency for your own religious beliefs (or even worse, the mere notion "I was circumcized and I don't want my son to look different", which is pure vanity).

Genital mutilation is abhorrent. It should be illegal to perform on any infant or child unless there is a rare medical necessity to do so.

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

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because people lie for many reasons. To get out of work, get disability, make a claim, to get opioids because they’re addicted to them etc. As a doctor, you’re probably going to become cynical after a while. This is very different from a baby because they have little motivation to lie and you can see them reacting to simple painful situations like bumping their head.

> As a doctor, you’re probably going to become cynical after a while. As my go to story on these sorts of issues, my partner had an ER doctor tell them that they hadn't been stabbed. The fact that there was an open wound oozing blood and multiple witnesses was not sufficient evidence. That wound was obviously a diabetic sore. That my partner is not diabetic was also a lie and the fact that their medical records showe…

How do some people end up making clearly counterproductive interpretations that ignore not only evidence in general, but clear evidence of harm to others?

I remember a Google employee changed a popular font for headings. It broke the layout on a very large number of websites.

Several people discussed this with the employee, suggesting the font should be forked rather than force-updated. The employee engaged, but refused. Eventually they said that if enough users contacted them with complaints, that would be evidence they would consider. When it was pointed out that it was very difficult to know how to contact them (they were not required to engage on the forum, or anywhere else, no contact information for them was otherwise findable, etc) they barely shrugged. It was as if part of the logic function in this human was managed by a 4 year old child internally.

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

#283
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.…

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

That’s fair. A better way to say what I mean might be “our opioid therapy protocols aren’t very good” or “we’ve relied on opioids in ways that cause more harm than good”.

There are situations where opioids are the obvious right answer. I have a similar anecdote, having to beg for an opioid refill when I was suffering from post-op pain.

While I admit I don’t know the details, I wonder if your knee pain is one of those situations where opioids aren’t close to an ideal solution, but we never actually developed an ideal solution because it was easier to throw opioids at every pain problem. Now opioids are no longer allowed and you get to replace opioids with nothing.

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it sad, how people universally agree that female genital mutilation is bad, because cutting off parts for no medical reason is bad.... but then do the same thing to boys, "just because".

Well, people don't universally agree that FGM is bad because there are people who practice FGM. Also, most people think MGM is… if not barbaric, at least weird , but are somewhat lenient in the name of religious tolerance. The US is the extremely weird outlier.

Yeah, i heard that about the US.. that hospitals in some places ask parents directly to do the circumcision after birth as a "default option", and parents have to "opt-out" of it. Really sad and barbaric.

Where i live (small eu country), there were some movements to make it illegal (unless medically needed), but it didn't pass, not to offend certain minorities.

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

#285
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should look into the details of how abortions are performed and what the process entails.

I couldn't find anything relevant regarding my question. If you have a source, please post it.

whatisabortion.com

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

#286
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Losing weight.

My wife has sleep apnea and her BMI is 19. So, not necessarily.

Congrats I guess? Your wife is an exception to a very well established norm. Losing weight is a treatment so good (as in, effective, safe, cheap) that most doctors will recommend it as the number 1 step in treating sleep apnea.

"What is becoming increasingly clear is that we need to continue to strongly advocate weight loss for all our patients, regardless of the severity of their OSA or adherence to our other therapies. The benefits of weight loss are, to a degree, unquestionable. This study highlights that tangible benefits can be obtained with weight-loss interventions. The challenge, as always, lies in the implementation of our lofty goals."

https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8384

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Some 60–90% of adults with OSA are overweight" https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/31/Supplement_2/S3...

I don't see your point. Obviously, some of those folks are just technically overweight - BMI at 25 - and aren't going to get as much help even though most of us picture obesity when looking at this. And that still leaves 10-40% that aren't and still have OSA.

> some of those folks are just technically overweight - BMI at 25 - and aren't going to get as much help

Citation needed. They are absolutely going to be benefited from weight loss.

"What is becoming increasingly clear is that we need to continue to strongly advocate weight loss for all our patients, regardless of the severity of their OSA or adherence to our other therapies. The benefits of weight loss are, to a degree, unquestionable. This study highlights that tangible benefits can be obtained with weight-loss interventions. The challenge, as always, lies in the implementation of our lofty goals."

https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8384

"Results: Relative to stable weight, a 10% weight gain predicted an approximate 32% (95% confidence interval [CI], 20%-45%) increase in the AHI. A 10% weight loss predicted a 26% (95% CI, 18%-34%) decrease in the AHI. A 10% increase in weight predicted a 6-fold (95% CI, 2.2-17.0) increase in the odds of developing moderate-to-severe SDB. "

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11122588/

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

#288
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My stock joke is that if the doctor or nurse says it won’t hurt, it will hurt at least a little. If they say it will hurt a little, it will hurt a lot. If they say it will probably hurt, time for serious anesthesia. Also, there’s pretty much no such thing as minor surgery except maybe skin tag removal.

Lucky you, if you dont have genetics were anesthesia do not work properly. Then find a doctor, who accepts that problem and gets it over with painful but fast. The hardest part is if you have a dentists that insist on anesthesia must work, but it wont, so you must act your ass off to prentend to not be in pain, so he wont push syringe after syringe, doing nothing and waiting for 15 minutes in between while your tooth…

As someone with very low tolerance for pain, this seems like my worst nightmare. I’m curious though, did your tolerance for pain increase over the years as you had to endure it?

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

#289
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shared that view I thought Obama, while supporting the right to abortion said, “we already have agreement, we both respect life, we both view abortion as a moral tragedy.” This seemed to recognize that no one should really be "pro-abortion" even if they have different views as to what role the government should be involved. My view changed when I heard Ilyse Hogue give a speech where people applauded and cheered wh…

I expect there are outliers, of course. Or people who've become so deeply attached to their tribal identity that their support for various wedge issues is extreme. My wife and I are very much pro-choice. At the same time, before we started our family, we had a deep discussion on the topic of abortion and how we felt about it. We decided we would only be able to abort the pregnancy if the child had trisomy 18, or was…

The Ilyse Hogue speech wasn't at some fringe event. It was at the democratic national convention, so not people I'd consider "whack jobs."

It just made me realize that my circles may tend to self select to leave out a large segment of people that have a very different view.

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

#290

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…

This inflicted pain and damage appears to have no significant impact on adult quality of life though. Circumcision may also even reduce the bacterial load and hence reduce chances of infections and cancer: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/10/acc-is-infant-circumci... It's a non-issue.

Your comment presumes that only a persons quality of life as an adult is important, which is a take I don’t think is defensible.
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