K.J.S. Anand was puzzled. Why did babies require such intensive care after surgery? So the young pediatrician-in-training took a look at what was going on in the operating room. He was shocked to discover that babies were having surgery with little or no anesthesia.
This was back in the dark ages of the early 1980s at Oxford University, esteemed home of the world's first anesthesiology department. It wasn't as if the Oxford surgeons were performing some sort of macabre experiments on infants. Operating on babies without anesthesia had been a common practice worldwide for nearly 40 years.
"At the time, it was the accepted notion that babies don't feel pain," says Anand, now a professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences' College of Medicine. "It was also assumed that anesthetic drugs are probably too strong for them, and the babies will die if they're exposed to anesthesia."
That belief went back to the 1940s and 1950s, when doctors lacked the technology to administer precise doses of anesthesia and monitor anesthetized patients' vital functions, Anand says. Many babies died from anesthesia overdoses. So instead of anesthesia, doctors gave babies large doses of muscle relaxants to paralyze them. No wonder "no one at that time was willing to believe that these babies were experiencing any form of stress," Anand says.
He was skeptical, and his research has proven him right. First, he found that babies' levels of stress hormones after surgery were triple those of anesthetized adults in post-op. Next, he compared stress hormone levels in infant surgical patients randomly assigned to receive anesthesia or not. As he had expected, levels in the anesthetized babies dropped to those of anesthetized adults.
He later conducted a similar study in babies having open-heart surgery at Boston Children's Hospital. In 1992, Anand published his findings, which, for the first time, showed that anesthesia could actually lower babies' risk of dying from surgery.
"There was a quiet revolution that occurred after that," Anand says, "and babies were given anesthesia." Still, he says, many hospitals routinely perform procedures such as drawing blood without first applying an anesthetic on young patients' skin, a practice that could have long-term behavioral and physiological consequences.
Source: USA Today, 8 May 2005
"After she was born, there was this feeling of contentment from the presence of her. My worries seemed inconsequential. She was there and I just stopped thinking about things I'd dwelt on for months." - Mary Kalergis (girl in photo)
Related Reading The New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 317, Number 21: Pages 1321-1329, 19 November 1987, "Pain and its Effects in the Human Neonate and Fetus" by K.J.S. Anand, M.B.B.S., D.Phil., AND P.R. Hickey, M.D
Note Dr Anand's conclusions, in the article above, that:-
"Numerous lines of evidence suggest that even in the human fetus, pain pathways as well as cortical and subcortical centers necessary for pain perception are well developed late in gestation, and the neurochemical systems now known to be associated with pain transmission and modulation are intact and functional. Physiologic responses to painful stimuli have been well documented in neonates of various gestational ages and are reflected in hormonal, metabolic, and cardiorespiratory changes similar to but greater than those observed in adult subjects. Other responses in newborn infants are suggestive of integrated emotional and behavioral responses to pain and are retained in memory long enough to modify subsequent behavior patterns."and that:-"current knowledge suggests that humane considerations should apply as forcefully to the care of neonates and young, nonverbal infants as they do to children and adults in similar painful and stressful situations."Note from the editor of this website:- Because of this medical report, humanity is gradually becoming aware that babies are conscious and feel pain. Our society has now stopped the child abuse of operating without anaesthetic and is working towards stopping the worst child abuse of all, killing babies without anaesthetic in abortion clinics. When the killing is stopped, our society will be making a large step forward towards civilisation.
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