Opererte små barn uten bedøvelse

[Pingvinen]

Helt grusomt at barn har blitt behandlet slik.
Da min eldste sønn ble født for snart tretti år siden, ble det en tøff påkjenning for ham, fordi han begynte og puste mens han stod fast slik at bare toppen av hodet hans viste. Klarte og få ham ut på den fjerde rien der han stod slik, og legene konkluderte med at alt var helt ok.
Jeg oppdaget omtrent rett etter jeg kom hjem fra sykehuset at gutten hadde klaustrofobi og var mørkredd. Jeg knyttet dette til den påkjenningen det må ha vært for ham og ta sine første åndedrag klemt fast. Legene har i alle år fnyst av meg fordi bebier kan ikke ha fobier eller være redd. Jeg har hele tiden holdt på mitt, og etter som forskningen går fremover, viser det seg jo nå at barn kan føle mye mer enn de tidligere trodde.

[Vigdis]

Jeg fant litt tilfeldig en utrolig spennende artikkel om smerte hos fostre og småbarn i New York Times

Twenty-five years ago, when Kanwaljeet Anand was a medical resident in a neonatal intensive care unit, his tiny patients, many of them preterm infants, were often wheeled out of the ward and into an operating room. He soon learned what to expect on their return. The babies came back in terrible shape: their skin was gray, their breathing shallow, their pulses weak. Anand spent hours stabilizing their vital signs, increasing their oxygen supply and administering insulin to balance their blood sugar.

“What’s going on in there to make these babies so stressed?” Anand wondered. Breaking with hospital practice, he wrangled permission to follow his patients into the O.R. “That’s when I discovered that the babies were not getting anesthesia,” he recalled recently. Infants undergoing major surgery were receiving only a paralytic to keep them still. Anand’s encounter with this practice occurred at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England, but it was common almost everywhere. Doctors were convinced that newborns’ nervous systems were too immature to sense pain, and that the dangers of anesthesia exceeded any potential benefits.

Anna Taddio, a pain specialist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto

..When we do something to a baby that is not an expected part of its normal development, especially at a very early stage, we may actually change the way the nervous system is wired,” she says. Early encounters with pain may alter the threshold at which pain is felt later on, making a child hypersensitive to pain — or, alternatively, dangerously indifferent to it. Lasting effects might also include emotional and behavioral problems like anxiety and depression, even learning disabilities (though these findings are far more tentative).

[Vigdis]

Jeg må legge til at det er en provoserende mann med i denne artikkelen

For all his vehemence in print, Derbyshire is affable in conversation, explaining that his laboratory research on the neurological basis of pain in adults led him to the matter of what fetuses feel: “For me, it’s an interesting test case of what we know about pain. It’s a great application of theory, basically.” The theory, in this case, is that the experience of pain has to be learned — and the fetus, lacking language or interactions with caregivers, has no chance of learning it. In place of distinct emotions, it experiences a blur of sensations, a condition Derbyshire has likened to looking at “a vast TV screen with all of the world’s information upon it from a distance of one inch; a great buzzing mass of meaningless information,” he writes. “Before a symbolic system such as language, an individual will not know that something in front of them is large or small, hot or cold, red or green” — or, Derbyshire argues, painful or pleasant.

He finds “outrageous” the suggestion that the fetus feels anything like the pain that an older child or an adult experiences. “A fetus is biologically human, of course,” he says. “It isn’t a cow. But it’s not yet psychologically human.” That is a status not bestowed at conception but earned with each connection made and word spoken. Following this logic to its conclusion, Derbyshire has declared that babies cannot feel pain until they are 1 year old.

I denne lenken er det en del vanlige folk som svarer på hva de mener om forskningen hans http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/ap...ellbeing/print (her har han moderert seg til 4 måneders alder av en eller annen grunn) http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question...7111947AA57PdD

If my children got bumbed, they cried. If they got pinched, they cried. When comforted, they stopped crying. If I stumbled, they felt fear of falling and cried out in fear. These researchers are idiots and should be banned from any further research that requires use of the scientific method!

They may not know the word "pain" or how to define or describe it, but they sure do feel it- otherwise why would they cry when feeling pain- even just discomfort like hunger or being wet? We can only hop the professor isn't reborn, because many people might want to poke him, as a new infant, with a pin!