In kids, EEG monitoring of consciousness safely reduces anesthetic use

> textbooks at the time taught that [open heart] surgery [...] ‘‘could be safely accomplished with only oxygen and a paralytic’’ 69(p.580) when performed on infants.

Textbooks isn't "some doctors errorneously believed", it is what most doctors believed, taught and practiced.

> infant surgery routinely conducted with no or minimal anesthesia well into the 1980s

"Routinely" isn't a few isolated cases, that's the word for "this is the usual thing to do".

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20608214/

> The study by McGraw (1941), although badly designed, convinced the vast majority of clinicians that infants do not feel pain and do not require analgesia. This theory, reinforced by the fear of using opioids in young children, dominated medical thinking for more than 30 years.

"Vast majority" and "dominated" also doesn't sound like just "some cases".

https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/17/opinion/l-why-infant-surg...

> surveys of medical professionals indicate that as recently as 1986 infants as old as 15 months were receiving no anesthesia during surgery at most American hospitals.

We can discuss the definition of "kid" and "newborn", but I would no longer call them "newborn" when they start walking. Also "most American hospitals" means the practice was very widespread even in 1986.

I think the whole situation is one of the medical community failing to recognize and admit their own mistakes. Instead, the obvious barbarism of the whole situation is played down, diminished and belittled. Thereby protecting their own feelings and standing at the cost of the victims' right to the truth. And thereby paving the way for a repetition of such gruesome mistakes. At which point I would argue, it might even be a little callousness or even intent...

What I meant is, it is "minor" as far as surgery goes, as opposed to "major". The distinction is about the risk to the life of the patient, the kind of anesthesia you need (local vs knockout), the setting you do it in (walk-in vs stay at the hospital) and the amount of aftercare required (change the bandage vs. medication+monitoring+hospital).

And those studies are BS, done to prove a preexisting point. Any properly done study by independent researchers without an agenda doesn't show any kind of effect from circumcision beyond the resulting sensory problems, deformation, nerve damage, erectile dysfunction, scarring and adhesion.

So with this kind of practice, you create any patient's worst nightmare: being cut open, feeling everything, knowing everything, but unable to stop it. And you are unknowing, uncaring or too cheap to prevent that e.g. via EEG monitoring.

Edit: Parent removed his comment. Roughly, from memory, there was some claim by him about being a professional anesthetist, having very rarely encountered EEG and only bi-spectral index monitoring (an EEG-derived computed measurement) in some IV cases, some claims about the unreliability of both and about the preference for MAC (minimum alveolar concentration) to monitor depth of anesthesia.

Modern technology and medicine in particular have made our lives better and longer in ways our near ancestors could not have dreamed of or hoped for.

It's not hard to find counterexamples of course: opioid addiction, climate change, etc. But on balance we're a hellava lot better off now than 50 or 500 years ago.

Nice to use a bit less anesthesia for faster/better recovery and money savings. But for goodness sake - let's not go TOO far down that path.

For example there is stuff like Ketamine, which in some cases can live up to its other use as a recreational drug and give the patient very colorful dreams. There are sedatives that just take away the capacity to form memories, but leave you awake and aware, just calmer. In cases like some knee surgeries, it is possible to leave the patient fully awake, just paralyze and numb the legs.