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Ach, minder erg dan wat men vroeger deed: tot eind jaren '80 kregen babies geen verdoving bij operaties, enkel een middel dat hun spieren verlamde. Omdat babies zogenaamd geen pijn zouden voelen, en ook al zouden ze het voelen, dan zouden ze het toch niet herinneren...
Dat veranderde pas nadat een moeder, die erachter kwam dat de open-hart operatie op haar zoontje zonder verdoving was uitgevoerd, een media-campagne startte.
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In the United States, a major change in practice was brought about by events surrounding one operation. Infant Jeffrey Lawson underwent open heart surgery in 1985. His mother, Jill R. Lawson, subsequently discovered that he had been operated on without any anaesthesia, other than a muscle relaxant. She started a vigorous awareness campaign which created such a public, and medical, reaction that by 1987 medical opinion had come full circle.
A number of studies on the measurement of pain in young children, and on ways of reducing the injury response began, and publications on the hormonal and metabolic responses of babies to pain stimuli began to appear, confirming that the provision of adequate anaesthesia and analgesia was better medicine on both humanitarian and physiological grounds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_babiesquote:
For years, even as life-saving surgeries became more invasive, longer, and more intense, the majority of newborns still underwent them without anesthetic. Often, they were given nothing more than a muscle relaxant to keep them from thrashing around during the operation. It was the best practice at the time, following the best available science. And it was horrifyingly wrong.
It probably goes without saying that infants can feel pain, as any parent or pediatrician could tell you. But it wasn’t until 1987 that the American Academy of Pediatrics formally declared it unethical to operate on newborns without anesthetics. Why physicians would knowingly inflict pain on newborns is complicated, but there were legitimate concerns that anesthesia itself could harm or kill the child.
More significantly, however, the medical establishment had convinced itself that babies couldn’t feel pain. Because babies can’t speak for themselves, scientists were left to interpret their body language. Studies from the 1940s supposedly confirmed that infants hadn’t yet developed the neurological capability for pain because they didn’t seem to react to pinprick tests.
Cloistered in medical journals, subsequent studies on infant pain showed that their pain responses are as well-developed as older children and that even fetuses, from the third trimester of gestation, possess the systems necessary to feel pain. But few surgeons and anesthetists knew about them, and challenges to accepted wisdom went ignored.
https://www.bostonglobe.c(...)TaNjJWV7M/story.html