Doctors learned how to save premature infants' lives. They forgot about pain.

[Jilly_in_VA]

When Mats Eriksson was just starting off as a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit in the 1980s, he truly hated one part of his job. To draw blood for the daily metabolic test, he had to prick the babies’ heels with a tiny lancet and squeeze their heels to collect enough blood for analysis. It was hard to do, and hard to watch.

“The children were crying; the mothers almost fainted,” he says. “I was sweaty all over. It was a really tough job for everyone. And we had nothing to offer.”

By anything to offer, he means drugs to treat the infants’ apparent pain. Strong drugs like morphine can be dangerous for such young bodies. Even everyday drugs like Tylenol and Advil can be harmful to use in infants because of their potential impacts on the liver and kidneys.

But a bigger reason why was more frustrating. “In those days, we did not believe that they could feel pain,” Eriksson says of infants. “We could see it, of course, but science said ‘no.’”

The NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) is where infants who are born prematurely — meaning infants born before 37 weeks of pregnancy — and full-term infants (who are born around 39 or 40 weeks) with health issues spend the first weeks and, often, months of their lives. Every day, they encounter painful pricks and prods from hospital staff to monitor them and keep their frail bodies alive. Eriksson recalls that even when the children needed invasive procedures like open-heart surgeries, they were done without any anesthesia or pain medication.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/22949159/nicu-babies-pain-treatments-podcast-unexplainable
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It's not just preemies. When I worked in neonatal, they treated full-term infants the same. And if a baby was born with something like Down syndrome, they were even worse. "Babies don't feel pain," they insisted. Wanna bet?

[ProudMNDemocrat]

1. Babies do not cry, they WAIL...

When in pain, hungry, or wet.

[cilla4progress]

2. Yeah, sorry, these extreme measures at either end of life

are just an egoistic thrill factory for physicians and researchers who think they are god.

For god's sake let people live and die in peace and with dignity!!

[Lancero]

6. ...Premature babies should be left to die?

Because trying to save them is just a egotistical attempt at playing God?

Really?

[cilla4progress]

9. Well, that's a vast oversimplification of the issue

being discussed here.

[Biophilic]

3. I mostly believe in science, but scientists not so much. They can be extremely short sighted.

They often see what they want to see and, except for when they love to disagree, they like to support each others theories and "facts";
like babies don't feel pain and animals don't have emotions. Maybe because they tend to deny their emotional side as well as the pain that blindness causes. Hmmmm

[mopinko]

4. childrens hospital in chi started give novocain when they started iv's about 15 years ago.

had a sick kid, so i saw it start. such a relief, even tho my kid was a real stoic.

i was a phlebotomist long, long ago. i actually always grabbed the ob floor. even tho i had to make the babies cry, i still got to see the babies. the part about having to squeeze isnt common, unless you chicken out when you do the stick.
and the moms were all happy, and they had juicy veins. nurses were usually pretty cheery too.

[Jilly_in_VA]

5. Neonstes will actually SCREAM

I know. I've heard it. Many times in neonatal care. Not only during procedures, either. Here's an example some of you may never have thought about.

We had a baby who was born after a long labor with what's called a "brow presentation". Forehead first, with his head actually scrunched back on his neck. He was a pretty big little guy, 8 lbs and change, and when I came in he was lying on the warmer screaming his head off, his head still bent back. "I bet he has one hell of a headache," said the charge nurse during report, when she heard about his horrible birth (the doc could have reached up in the mom--who'd had a spinal and wouldn't feel it--and straightened things out but he was an old-timer and very sexist besides and maybe didn't even know how). After we got done with the early shift business of rounds and stuff, and delivered other bables to their moms, the charge nurse went and got this little guy, swaddled him, put a cool washcloth on his head, and spent most of the night cuddling him and gently massaging and stroking his neck and shoulder area and the back of his head. He settled down eventually and his neck relaxed. She knew more than the doctor.

[Greybnk48]

7. Infants feel pain in the moment, but they don't experience it.

Brain development, at that point, does not include the memory needed to suffer from pain. You must remember it, to suffer.

It's like a drug used in surgery, Versed. It wipes our your memory for a short while, and even if you "felt" the pain of being cut on, you will not remember it, and therefore not experience it.

That's what they mean by "Babies don't feel pain." It's very misleading to say it that way, keeping in mind that most doctors are young mom's and dad's themselves who do not "get off" on hurting babies. Some docs "almost faint" at that sort of thing too, like the nurse in the article.

[Jilly_in_VA]

8. You don't know what they actually retain

And no, "most doctors" aren't "young moms and dads themselves" unless you are maybe in a teaching hospital. I did neonatal in a community hospital where a significant number of the doctors were older males, and even the one female pediatrician, who was reasonably humane, was moving on into middle age. The only doctor who seemed at all to be cognizant of infant pain was a 40-something FP, and he was a D.O. who a lot of the docs looked down on.

I think you are somewhat misinformed. You may have gotten your information from scientific studies. Babies can't tell us what they remember, even when they get older, but they can often show us, days or even weeks later. Go work in neonatal or NICU sometime.

[Greybnk48]

10. Neither do you! Your experience is with a fully developed brain.

None of us know what it's like because we don't remember.

I worked in OB and Surgery for 10 years, and I'm a doctoral candidate in Philosophy and Ethics, including medical ethics.

[Jilly_in_VA]

12. When you see

a newborn retract their leg and scream when that leg is grabbed in a certain way, you can bet they remember something, and I'm betting it's the pain of that heel stick. Just because they can't tell us later (they have no words for what they experienced) doesn't mean they don't remember. It could very well surface later in therapy.

And your credentials don't give you the right to pontificate either.

[ck4829]

11. Anytime someone says "'Group X' don't feel pain". Pretty sure they do.