As recently as 1999, we thought babies couldn't feel pain till they were 1yo | Hacker News Reader

As recently as 1999, we thought babies couldn't feel pain till they were 1yo

en.wikipedia.org

10 pointsisomorph7 comments

I find the constant use of "we" in these types of headlines rather off-putting. Who is this "we" you speak of?

It may be true that "As recently as 1999, it was commonly stated that babies could not feel pain until they were a year old ..." In fact, that is the actual statement in the Wikipedia article. It says nothing about "we" believing it.

It wouldn't be the first time I disagreed with a "commonly stated" belief, but I must admit I never heard this statement and a moment's reflection will show that this is a bold claim that would need some substantial proof before it could be believed.

In fact, if you go to the work cited in Wikipedia[1], you see:

> As late as 1999, it was stated that “[p]ain experience is placed at approximately 12 months of age” (66).

Checking that reference[2], we see in the abstract the statement

> Pain experience is placed at approximately 12 months of age, though this is within the context of a continuum of awareness rather than a straight ‘on‐off’ switch. The major moral implication of this stance is to place the burden of proof for analgesic use onto clinical measures, rather than relying upon the, so far, poorly supported assumption of pain awareness.

That last sentence indicates that the whole paper is written to argue against the assumption of pain awareness. On the basis of that snippet (I can't access the full paper), it looks like the assertion in Wikipedia is not valid, and your headline is even more misleading.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3385812/

[2]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8519.00...

Apologies. I was unthinkingly trying to condense the sentence from the article into the character limit for HN titles

Anyone who's ever seen an infant get a shot or be circumcised should know that this is complete bunk. Babies don't cry for no reason.

I reportedly slept through my own circumcision and never seemed to even notice getting shots. My own son never reacted to shots as a baby. I'm not saying it didn't hurt, but I do think very young babies may feel pain differently and/or that "feeling pain" also includes anticipation and other factors.

This is all MHO and anecdotal, so please don't think I'm trying to state anything as fact or an educated opinion.

Thanks for the addition to the discussion. Just wondering - was a family member in the room when you were circumcised? I’m just trying to figure out if the report of you sleeping through the circumcision was initially given by a doctor/nurse and then repeated by family, or if a family member witnessed it firsthand. (Simply because, anecdotally, even when the baby has screamed their head off, the doctor/nurse will tell the parents that they slept through it, so as not to distress the parents)

I’ve also heard the hypothesis that babies will go into shock much earlier than adults and will therefore be silent, or start choking / having a seizure silently, during traumatic surgery.

Part of the origin of this “belief” was to justify things like neonatal surgery (e.g. heart valve repair for “blue babies”) when there were no good anesthesia protocols for newborns. Hard to do the job that you feel is saving the kids life if you are making them suffer.

I've seen several videos where babies (most of them less than 20 weeks) feel pain in-utero . The reaction is not coincidental but in direct response to the stimulation.

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