24 March 2005

Pain relief.

As recently as the 1960s it was commonly believed that infants could feel no pain and surgery would be performed without anaesthetics. Sounds unbelievable to me, but a nurse told us today. Considering that, 2005 seems like a pretty good year to have been born. Nowadays they’re working on a brilliant method of determining how the child is feeling and if, and if so to what degree, it is in pain.

On a three grade scale they try to evaluate things like frowns, squinting, tensions in mouth and tongue, shivering chin, arm and leg movements, breathing patterns, crying and consolability. If the sum total exceeds a certain number, they administer pain relief. The higher the number, the higher the dose, I guess.

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