This was state of the art in medicine for quite some time. I fear the general trend of "medication bad" will get us back to those dark times.
Btw, those dark times ended only as recently as 1987! https://www.newsweek.com/when-doctors-start-using-anesthesia...
Note that this does not mean that general anaesthesia was not given at all to kids before 1987, but that there was a belief in the USA (and elsewhere) that newborns did not need pain relief during anaesthesia. Your use of 'kids' versus 'newborns' is a bit misleading in that respect.
> textbooks at the time taught that [open heart] surgery [...] ‘‘could be safely accomplished with only oxygen and a paralytic’’ 69(p.580) when performed on infants.
Textbooks isn't "some doctors errorneously believed", it is what most doctors believed, taught and practiced.
> infant surgery routinely conducted with no or minimal anesthesia well into the 1980s
"Routinely" isn't a few isolated cases, that's the word for "this is the usual thing to do".
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20608214/
> The study by McGraw (1941), although badly designed, convinced the vast majority of clinicians that infants do not feel pain and do not require analgesia. This theory, reinforced by the fear of using opioids in young children, dominated medical thinking for more than 30 years.
"Vast majority" and "dominated" also doesn't sound like just "some cases".
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/17/opinion/l-why-infant-surg...
> surveys of medical professionals indicate that as recently as 1986 infants as old as 15 months were receiving no anesthesia during surgery at most American hospitals.
We can discuss the definition of "kid" and "newborn", but I would no longer call them "newborn" when they start walking. Also "most American hospitals" means the practice was very widespread even in 1986.
I think the whole situation is one of the medical community failing to recognize and admit their own mistakes. Instead, the obvious barbarism of the whole situation is played down, diminished and belittled. Thereby protecting their own feelings and standing at the cost of the victims' right to the truth. And thereby paving the way for a repetition of such gruesome mistakes. At which point I would argue, it might even be a little callousness or even intent...
And the exact definition of the anesthesia given to most infants before 1987: A paralytic. Nothing else.
If you feel adventurous, have your family doctor give you a paralytic and then push a sterile needle under your fingernail. Then tell me the exact definition of sufficient anesthesia in that case ;)
To my knowledge, this was only true for newborns. Infants and up usually got some sort of hypnotic.
The exact same reaction kills non-adults. The proof took longer, but it is there now. That doctors even needed proof instead of, without further experimental knowledge, assuming the null hypothesis of children being small adults in this case already is proof of a kind of chauvinistic barbarism. Infants were some kind of lesser human to them, thus couldn't react in the same way as adults.
Remember, the norm was _no_ analgesia, _no_ pain relief. For the majority of infants. Its not that they decided on a case by case basis on the right balance of analgesia vs. risk. They decided as a matter of course that analgesia was superfluous for infants.
Modern technology and medicine in particular have made our lives better and longer in ways our near ancestors could not have dreamed of or hoped for.
It's not hard to find counterexamples of course: opioid addiction, climate change, etc. But on balance we're a hellava lot better off now than 50 or 500 years ago.
Nice to use a bit less anesthesia for faster/better recovery and money savings. But for goodness sake - let's not go TOO far down that path.
I think the rest of what you're saying is fairly accurate, though.
I think this won't ever happen. Modern docs would absolutely not accept working under such conditions. Anesthesia is not only comfort for the patient, but also for care providers. As you can often see when surgeons advise patients on refusing local anesthesia or nurses demanding benzos for the screaming demented patient at 2 a.m.
Let me preempt one possible line here: I do not love the circumstances under which I would have been circumcised as a neonate in Mississippi in the very early 1980s, and I do not resent the result. Living that far tied up in the past is for men who can't figure out how to do anything else. I am not one of those and despite an essential sympathy with the theoretical basis of their position that no putative benefit remotely justifies the the risk of the intervention, I have a short way with "intactivists."
But if it had been possible safely to administer more than EMLA (perhaps!) for pain relief, not even in that place and time would anyone be so barbaric as to refuse it. Of course. And that, making possible that precise measure of mercy in the case where the intervention is not merely cosmetic, is exactly that at which this research is directed. So, to anyone looking to make a cause of the ghosts of a billion foreskins or whatever, I would say please do not attempt even by implication to recruit my argument in support of your position.
They did major surgery. Like opening the cranium or abdomen. Like removing limbs. Like removing burnt skin by brushing it off and applying skin grafts. And no, they didn't even apply Lidocain, because children don't feel pain. At best, they gave muscle relaxants as chemical restraints and to make the tissue easier to cut.
Jesus, I tried as hard as I knew how not to start a fight, knowing this place plays host to a few foreskin mourners. Better just to avoid entirely, it appears, and duly noted.
What a shame the eyeroll emoji is filtered here. That, apparently, is the level people are on. A paragraph is too much! Or is everyone still rationing since Cerebral, or whatever that telemedicine pill mill was called, shut down a few years back? Is that why no one is reading today?
I never thought I'd say this, but for God's sake and as a favor to us both, pipe my shit through ChatGPT and ask for a reframing on a sixth-grade reading level. You pay for access to the damned robot, let it wipe your nose through the remedial work. I've got embroidery to do and movies to watch.