The Horrifying Truth About Infant Surgery in Medical History

Did you know that there was a time when doctors performed surgery on babies without anesthesia?

And this wasn't minor stuff.

We're talking open heart surgery.

And what might just shock you the most is how recently they were still doing this.

Hey y'all, I'm Christina and you're listening to History in Here Say.

I came across the comment about a year or so ago on another Creators video talking about

how doctors used to operate on babies without any pain medications or numbing agents.

And I thought there is no way this is true.

So I looked into it and this was completely a thing.

But parents weren't even always told about this ahead of time, which is honestly just horrific

to think about.

As a mom, this is one of those topics that seriously just makes my chest hurt.

It was physically painful for me to research this.

But I guess it's pretty fitting because today's episode is all about pain.

Now I can't be the only one who's never heard of this until recently, so leave me a comment

down below and let me know if you knew about this.

And if you did, where did you learn about it?

Because this was certainly not something that I learned in school.

Jeffrey Lawson was born three months early in February of 1985.

At 26 weeks gestation, he weighed just 1.5 pounds.

He was alert and active, but very sick.

At just two weeks old, Jeffrey's health declined.

He had developed a heart defect that was common in premature infants, condition, patent

ductus, arteriosus, or PDA required open heart surgery.

So Jeffrey was transferred to the nearest children's hospital for this very invasive procedure.

This procedure involved holes being cut on either side of his neck and chest to insert

a catheter into his jugular vein.

His chest was in open from breast palm to backbone.

His flesh was lifted and his ribs pride apart as a blood vessel near his heart was tied

off.

Once the procedure was complete, all the tissues were stitched back together.

But what his mother, Jill Lawson, did not know was that Jeffrey was awake and conscious

throughout the entire procedure, meaning baby Jeffrey had felt every bit of the excruciating

pain of open heart surgery.

Sadly, Jeffrey died just five weeks later.

After his death is when Jill found out the truth that a nethicizing baby's for surgery

was not common practice.

She called her doctor for reassurance that her son had been given something for pain.

The anesthesiologist informed Jill that Jeffrey had only been given a paralytic to keep

him still, but nothing for pain.

The doctor told Jill that it had not occurred to her to get the child anything because it

had never been demonstrated that babies could fill pain.

I cannot even imagine like you're already grieving and then you find out that your baby

was essentially tortured prior to his death.

Jill of course was horrified at this discovery as any mother would be.

She would never have allowed her son to be operated on this way had she known.

Now of course doctors in this time weren't just cruel and sadistic.

They just had very wrong ideas about infants in pain.

There was a belief that babies had underdeveloped nervous systems which meant they could not

experience pain like adults too until they were older and had matured a bit.

Textbooks at the time taught that surgeries like the one Jeffrey underwent could be safely

accomplished with only oxygen in a paralytic.

And there was also the fact that anesthetics available at the time were extremely risky

for babies.

There was the possibility that those drugs could kill them.

So why take that risk if infants couldn't fill pain?

Ever as a mother, Jill felt that it was very obvious that babies could, in fact, fill

pain and she wondered why so many doctors just took what was written in their textbook

as facts without giving it any more thought.

She said, if I had been told by a physician, no matter how senior that infants didn't

fill pain, I would never have believed it.

What constitutes the difference between my reaction and that of the thousands of physicians

who did believe it?

When Jill told her son's story to the New York Times, their researcher found that 77%

of newborns who underwent surgery to repair PDA between 1954 and 1983 had only been given

muscle relaxants and nitrous oxide.

Basically this was an anti-anxiety medication and a very weak anesthetic.

Now that's pretty wild to think about because this was only about 40 years ago that this

was still considered the norm.

So if you're anything like Jill, you might be wondering.

Now in the world, did so many people just go along with this to the point that cutting

into babies without any pain medication became a standard medical practice?

Well, when it comes to looking at the medical community's ideas on infant pain, we have

to start with the attitude towards pain in general.

One thing that was really different prior to the latter part of the 20th century was that

pain wasn't really thought of as some negative thing that doctors were highly focused on

alleviating like they are in more modern times.

While the age of enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries did begin to shift things,

pain was often still seen as being beneficial even until the 19th century.

Not only was pain helpful for a diagnosis, but also for treatment.

Since pain often happened during the course of an illness and loss of sensation, typically

happened when a patient was close to death, pain was seen as the body's way of healing

naturally.

So much so that doctors in the 19th century would sometimes induce pain as a way to help

the body heal.

Doctors were basically like, if you're strong enough to feel pain, that's a good sign.

Some speculate that perhaps a lack of medical options for alleviating pain also contributed

to doctors viewing it in a positive light.

Regardless, this view was so strongly held that when ether and chloroform came onto the

scene around 1846, it got some pushback.

Many people at that time also had religious views of pain as being a part of God's design

and completely natural, like the pain experienced during childbirth.

But in addition to that, the earliest forms of anesthesia were very risky, as I mentioned

earlier, and many people struggle to decide if the risks were worth taking.

With all of that in mind, it might be slightly easier to see why infant pain wasn't taken

so seriously, because pain in general wasn't taken that seriously.

Though I have to admit, my modern mindset makes it really hard for me to place myself

in these people's shoes, because pretty much every ounce of my being says to protect

children and babies it all cost.

So it's really hard to separate that, but there's an explanation for you, take it for

what you will.

Now, there's also the fact that since pain wasn't seen as such a big deal, it wasn't

being researched that much, which meant they weren't really advancing the science of

pain management.

And there really weren't many good options for alleviating pain or anesthetizing babies

in the first place.

So the question of whether infants could feel pain or not seemed irrelevant to many in

the medical community, as they couldn't do much about the pain regardless.

Though some doctors did still anesthetize babies and young children, it was just extremely

risky to put children under.

It's still risky today, but the further you go back, the risk it was.

They weren't as skilled with knowing how much to give children, much less babies.

Back in the 1960s, many years before I was born, I had an uncle who I believe was about

four or five years old at the time, who was put under for a necessary but routine surgical

procedure, and unfortunately he passed away.

Now the reason given for his passing was contributed to the fact that he had been given too much anesthesia.

So if it was still that much of a risk in the 1960s, I can only imagine how much more

it would have been in the 18 and early 1900s.

So while it's horrific to imagine an infant or a small child being in such terrible pain

during a procedure, them dying from the medication is also terrible.

Just to summarize, at the risk of repeating myself, doctors were being trained that babies

didn't feel pain.

And the assumption from some people is that the reason they didn't allow themselves to

really question what the textbooks were telling them was because these were life saving

procedures that were being performed and there really were no pain relieving options

for these infants.

Now for me, the nagging question is where did these ideas that babies couldn't feel

pain come from in the first place?

Now we can't really point this back to a single reason why scientists denied infant pain

as there were many historical facts that played a role.

But what's interesting is that infant pain denial was actually a more modern thing.

Historians have shown that ancient and medieval doctors clearly believed that infants felt

pain.

They even developed treatments to alleviate it, including the use of opiates.

In 1656, physician France Vitz, I know I said that wrong, I'll have it on the screen.

Reason that babies must feel pain even more intensely than adults since their bodies are

so delicate, even more so for premature babies.

So because of examples like this, many point to the influence of Darwin's theory of evolution

as being the thing that shifted the way children were viewed in previous centuries to how

they were viewed and studied in the 18 and early 1900s.

The Darwinian view of the child as a lower being classified infants with the lower animals

due to their limited mental capacity.

Darwin often used observations of infants to support his ideas about inherited traits

and reflexes.

At the time, a theory called recapulation emphasized how important it was to understand child

development.

During this period, scientific thinking began to change how infants were viewed.

Instead of being seen as feeling sensitive beings, they were increasingly treated as objects

to be studied in a detached experimental way.

This growing interest in children led to the child study movement in the 1890s.

Supporters of this movement believed there wasn't enough scientific knowledge about how

children developed, and they pushed for more research into children's physical and

mental growth.

Hereby, Darwin's own short work called Biographical Sketch of An Infant, Parents and Teachers

were encouraged to keep detailed records of children's development, and these observations

were seen as valid scientific data.

Parents carefully recorded things like their babies' senses and behaviors, but they were

naturally hesitant to experiment with pain.

So because of this, infant pain was rarely discussed in these records.

This lack of data from parents, along with Darwin's classification of infants as lower

beings, helped to contribute to the idea that infants do not feel pain.

Darwin's suggestion that infants' emotional expressions were simply reflexes or habits

made researchers less likely to trust an infant's reaction as a sign of true pain.

Initially, these experiments under Darwin's influence were pretty basic, as scientists

were encouraged to study infant behaviors such as their senses and reflexes.

But eventually, these early studies paid the way for more formal experiments.

In the 1800s, it was widely held that women were more sensitive to pain.

On the flip side, so-called lower races and classes, were also thought to experience

less pain.

This included babies who couldn't speak up while the mothers could, so often doctors

would focus on the mother's pain after childbirth and not really give any thought to what the

baby might be experiencing.

I was actually a little surprised when I read that because so many women have reported

that their pain was not taken seriously over the years.

Now when it came to older children, like not infants, there was a debate on whether they

experienced more or less pain than women, but it was widely believed that the elderly felt

less pain as old age was thought to lower your ability to fill pain.

It's kind of funny reading all this because it just feels like it's flipped on its head

from what we think now, like we see infants as elderly as like the most fragile ones,

which is the complete opposite of how it was back then.

In 1848, Henry Bigelow published the history of anesthesia, in which he wrote that an infant's

limited memory rendered him incapable of suffering.

His basic argument was kind of like, even if they do feel pain, they won't remember it,

so it's okay.

In 1852, Dr. Abel Pearson reported on six successful cleft palate surgeries, noting

that babies felt more pain as the days went on, and so he said that these procedures should

be done as close to birth as possible.

Now despite these ideas, there were doctors even back in the 1840s and 1850s who would

anesthetize, I'm going to say that wrong every time I apologize, who would anesthetize children

in infants, but this was often used more with the purpose of keeping them still for the

procedure than for alleviating pain.

But lucky them, the squirmy baby got the meds.

As medicine wasn't making practical advances, scientists were also studying pain in a more

theoretical way.

For example, Ernest Weber researched how sensitive people are to touch and how well they can

locate where they're being touched.

But he didn't clearly explain how pain works.

However, his work was still important because it helped to shape the field of psychophysics,

which is the study of how physical sensations are perceived.

His idea that each sensation has measurable limits, called thresholds, influenced many

scientists in the 1800s.

During this time, science programs were expanding in German universities, which supported more

experimental research in physiology.

This led to a better understanding of the nervous system.

So this understanding was still incomplete, and this limited knowledge led to many disagreements

among scientists at that time.

They debated whether pain is controlled by the brain and spinal cord, aka the central

nervous system, or by nerves throughout the body, which is known as the peripheral nervous

system.

They also argued about whether there are specific receptors and pathways just for pain,

or if pain is part of a more general sensory system.

The first person to bring together these ideas, and actually test how sensitive infants

are to pain, was Alfred Ginzmeier.

In 1873, while studying medicine at university, he published investigations on the psychic function

of the newborn.

Guy's smile was interested in how babies experience the world through their senses.

He built on the work of Adolf Kuzmahl, a respected doctor who had tested newborn reactions

to touch on areas like the tongue, lips, nose, and eyelashes.

Kuzmahl had taken a very cautious approach.

He used gentle tools like feathers and glass rods, and stopped his experiments when babies

seemed uncomfortable.

Ginzmeier, however, took things a bit further.

At a midwife training school in Leipzig, he tested nearly 60 infants by pricking them

with pins.

He even targeted very sensitive areas like the nose, lips, and hands, sometimes drawing

small drops of blood.

Despite this, he claimed the babies showed no signs of pain, not even small movements.

Although he noticed that their eyes sometimes became watery.

He dismissed this as unrelated.

These observations caused Guy's murder to conclude that newborns have a very weak ability

to fill pain.

Of course, as I've mentioned several times already, his conclusions weren't unusual for

his time, as most researchers in the 1800s had reached similar conclusions.

I think it's kind of obvious that there were some flaws in the way that they were conducting

their studies because they also thought that babies couldn't hear for several days after

birth because they didn't respond to sounds.

At this time, the scientific method was still new and evolving.

Scientists were eager to appear rigorous and credible, so they were extremely cautious

about drawing conclusions.

Ironically, however, this often led them to doubt real phenomena like infant pain, especially

when the evidence wasn't clear.

It's believed that Gensmar's work, I'm sorry, I'm trying to say this guy's names right,

but I think I'm going to say it different every time I say it.

I think Gensmar might be a little closer to accurate than what I said last time, but

anyway, it's believed that his work might have been completely forgotten if it hadn't

been cited by Wilhelm Pryor in his 1882 book The Mind of the Child.

It's Pryor or Pryor?

Anyway, Pryor's work, which was much more detailed than earlier studies, became highly

influential in child psychology.

Because Pryor was studying his own son, he didn't perform painful experiments.

Instead, he observed that his child was actually very sensitive to touch,

reacting even to the slightest contact.

However, he relied heavily on Gensmar's finding and repeated the idea that newborns often

don't react to things that would hurt older children like needle pricks or even minor surgical

procedures.

Still, Pryor didn't fully agree that infants feel no pain.

He pointed out that infants enjoyed breastfeeding and clearly show signs of discomfort, especially

through crying, was she described as being sharp and persistent when they are in pain.

Rather than rejecting Gensmar's findings, Pryor tried to explain them.

He suggested that infants might not react to pinpricks simply because those stimuli affect

only a few nerves.

Since newborns nervous systems are still developing, they may need stronger stimulation like a pinch

or a slap to trigger a visible response as this would reach more cutaneous nerves.

In the end, Pryor's conclusion was mixed.

He believed that infants didn't experience pain in the same way adults do, but he did not

deny altogether that they did feel pain.

Like many scientists of his time, Pryor was focused on cataloging infant reflexes.

Now, this focus came from the Darwinian ideas about understanding behavior as something shaped

by evolution.

By the late 19th century, this emphasis on reflexes, combined with developing scientific methods

and the belief that infants were primitive, is what led to the more mechanical view of babies

that I mentioned earlier.

In this way of thinking, made experiments on infant pain more common and more widely accepted.

While Darwin's ideas got the ball rolling for experimenting on infants, the rise of

behavioralism in the early 20th century expanded these ideas even further.

Behaviorism and psychology focused only on observable behavior and rose to prominence

in 1913 after John Watson published his behaviorist manifesto, in which he argued that psychology

should be a strictly objective science, meaning researchers should ignore anything that

they couldn't directly observe and focus on measurable actions.

This is where things took a turn in how scientists study pain.

Pain was no longer seen as a subjective experience, but simply a physical reaction.

A stimulus such as a pinprick followed by a response like crying or pulling their foot

away was now being interpreted as automatic reflexes and not proof of real pain.

At this point, scientists became extremely cautious with labeling anything as true pain.

Even when babies cried or reacted strongly, scientists often refused to say the stimulus

was causing pain.

They didn't want to make assumptions beyond what they could strictly observe.

By focusing only on measurable observable behaviors, researchers often ignored or dismissed

science that infants were in pain, in trying to be strictly scientific, they sometimes

introduced bias into their work without even realizing it.

According to Science Direct, one important lesson from this is that following scientific

methods too rigidly can actually hide bias instead of preventing it.

For instance, many researchers relied heavily on the idea of null hypothesis, which is

the assumption that nothing is happening unless proven otherwise.

But infants can't explain their pain the way adults can.

Their reactions may be slower, less specific, or harder to interpret.

Because of this, scientists often failed to prove that infants felt pain even when there

were clear signs.

As a result, they defaulted to the conclusion that infants might not feel pain at all.

Many researchers were so focused on being objective and methodically precise, like I mentioned,

that they didn't question their own assumptions.

In particular, they often viewed infants through an adult lens, expecting adult-like responses

as proof of pain like it never occurred to them that infants might respond to things differently

than adults.

But at the same time, their tendency to see infants as simple, reflex-driven beings made

them more likely to dismiss evidence of real pain.

Margaret Gray-Blanton, who studied newborn behavior in 1917 at John Hopkins, was a good

example of this type of overly cautious researcher.

She observed babies crying during painful procedures like deep pinpricks and circumcision, and

basically every time she described the infant's behavior as basic reflexes.

If a baby moved his leg away from a needle during a prick, she would say it was normal

kicking and not as a pain response.

In one of her experiments, she pricked 21 sleeping infants on the wrist with a pin.

Eight of those babies didn't react at all, and she used this to support the idea that

newborns are less sensitive to touch early in life.

The work of Irene Sherman, Mandel Sherman, and their colleagues in the 1930s demonstrates

another shift in this field as scientists work to eliminate all uncertainty from their

results.

She believes that the inconsistent results they got from the pinpricks with some babies

reacting while others didn't, could be solved if they conduct better controlled experiments.

And so that it held special tools called Elgometers, which were devices designed to deliver

carefully measured pain.

One used a controlled needle prick and another delivered small electrical shocks.

These experiments showed that infants often had predictable physical reactions, like

moving the opposite limb when stimulated.

The researchers interpreted this as a basic reflex controlled by the lower parts of the brain,

not a conscious experience.

So from this, they concluded that infants functioned by relying on primitive brain activity

rather than higher thought.

Even after all of their detailed experiments, researchers were still cautious to label any

of the reactions they were seeing as pain responses.

They kind of had a weird take on all of this because they argued that since infants lacked

complex thought and emotions that might influence responses, they were better to study than

adults.

But at the same time, they concluded that since infants can't tell us what they're feeling,

we can't assume it's pain.

So essentially, the infant's actual experience was seen as unknowable and therefore kind of

treated as unimportant, which to me contradicts the idea that they're better study because

with that attitude, how do you ever get any results?

These studies were often published alongside the experiments done on animals, which goes

to show you how infants were thought of at that time.

And this idea that infants were essentially reflex driven and not fully conscious went

largely unchallenged, which led to an environment where experiments on infant pain became routine

and were often conducted without more ethical concern.

So the conclusion that the Sherman's came to about how the infant's responses to pain,

stimuli were primarily spinal and brainstem reflexes rather than conscious, cortical, cortical?

I think that's right.

Perception is a pain led to the next shift in how researchers studied infant pain.

And one of the key figures in the shift in movement was Myrtle McGraw, who is best known

for her long-term study of twins, Jimmy, and Johnny, where she showed how different types

of physical stimulation could affect development, which is another famous case that could probably

be a whole episode on its own, but basically she treated one of the twins completely normally

how a child would be treated, and the other child was given all kinds of extra stimulation

and training to see what he could accomplish.

One of the things that he did that was like a pretty famous thing that came out of study

is that he learned how to roller skate when he was only 13 months old, which is pretty

astonishing.

The experiments she did on the twins are obviously controversial today, but they were videotaped

and there are lots of video clips showing her putting them through their paces that can

be found on YouTube if you want to go and look for them.

The lasting effects that these experiments had on the lives of the twins was kind of sad

because once they got famous from all of this, the one that was taught how to do all these

amazing physical feats was held in higher regard, and people actually looked down the

brother that wasn't given all this extra attention, like he was mentally slow or something,

because he couldn't do all the same things, but obviously he had not received the same

training.

So while the case is pretty well known, what many people don't know is that Myrtle McGraw

also studied how the twins reacted to pain.

She used a blunt pin point to stimulate areas like their arms, legs, and cheeks, and

she did this experiment on other infants as well, and she observed that many newborns

showed little to no reaction to this kind of stimulation, and concluded that at births,

babies may not be very sensitive to this type of irritation.

However, she also noticed that by about one week old, infants became much more reactive,

often pulling away or showing clear signs of discomfort.

Unlike earlier researchers who were trying to measure a pain threshold, McGraw was more

interested in what these reactions revealed about brain development.

She believed that as the brain matured, infants' responses to stimuli would change.

In later research, she expanded this idea by studying 75 children from birth to age 4.

These children were repeatedly tested with pinpricks, resulting in over 2,000 observations.

Based on this largest data set, McGraw concluded that newborns' responses are controlled

mainly by deeper, more primitive parts of the brain, rather than the higher thinking

areas.

So, these people are also coming to the same conclusions.

She supported this idea with evidence from brain studies, which suggested that newborns

seebral cortex, the part responsible for higher thought, is not fully functional at birth.

As a result, she argued that newborns might have reduced physical activity and possibly

a reduced sensory experience, including pain.

McGraw's work became very influential, and later researchers often treated her cautious

conclusions as established facts.

However, not everyone agreed.

Al-Rach Piper, a respected German pediatrician, strongly challenged these ideas.

In his own studies during the 1920s, he tested newborns by pricking their heels with the

needle.

He found that even relatively shallow pricks caused clear reactions, such as movement and

crying.

Although premature babies sometimes responded more slowly, they still reacted.

Piper also observed a wide range of responses, including movements that seemed directly

aimed at protecting the irritated area.

He openly criticized earlier researchers, arguing that their conclusions were flawed.

Based on his own findings, Piper firmly believed that all healthy newborns can fill pain.

In fact, he claimed that even an unborn baby could show reactions to a pin prick.

Piper went further, arguing that if a baby doesn't respond to pain, it may actually

be a sign of illness, not normal development.

He also pointed out that differences in results could be explained by factors like whether

a baby was asleep, hungry, sick, or distracted, all of which could affect how they responded.

While Piper agreed that the brain is still developing a newborns, he argued that pain

responses don't depend on the higher brain, the cerebral cortex.

Instead, they rely on the brain stem, which is functional, even in very young infants.

Because he believed the evidence for infant pain was clear, Piper ended his work with a

strong ethical warning.

He argued that just as adults have the right to pain relief during medical procedures,

infants should have the same protection.

He criticized doctors who performed surgeries on babies without anesthesia, calling this

practice both scientifically wrong and morally unacceptable.

Despite his strong stance, Piper's warnings were largely ignored at the time.

Research on infant pain in the early 20th century continued to influence later work, especially

through a 1954 review by Carl Pratt.

In his summary, Pratt looked at earlier studies by Geysmer, Prayer, The Sherman's, and

Piper.

He concluded that while there was evidence newborns could respond to pain stimulus, scientists

still disagreed about how much pain infants actually felt compared to older children.

By this time, researchers were no longer studying infant pain just to understand it, they

were using it as a diagnostic tool.

For example, Francis Graham and her colleague studied traumatized infants using electric shock.

They found that these infants had weaker responses, including reduced reactions to pain.

They chose pain as a measure, partly because they assumed newborns were not fully sensitive

to pain.

After 1950, interest in infant pain itself began to decline.

Very few direct studies were conducted between 1960 and 1980.

One of the only experiments during this time, published in 1974, found that infants typically

responded to pinpricks with movement, facial expressions, and crying.

Interestingly, this study largely ignored earlier research, except for Piper's work.

This decline in research may suggest that many scientists and doctors believed the issue

was already settled.

There was enough skepticism about infant pain that medical professionals often felt justified

in not using anesthesia on babies.

Since Mertle McGraw's research on brain development, especially her ideas that infants' brains were

not fully developed, fit well with existing medical practices, her conclusions were widely

accepted and often used to justify limited pain treatments for infants.

In 1968, anesthesiologist Linda Swofford and David Allen argued that children rarely needed

pain medication after surgery.

In their hospital, only 26 out of 180 pediatric patients received narcotics.

They used McGraw's ideas to support their reasoning.

They argued that a baby's ability to feel pain depends on brain development, especially

the cerebral cortex.

According to them, a newborn's brain is similar to that of a heavily anesthetized adult.

Many may react physically to stimuli, but are not consciously aware of pain.

Even when babies cry, they suggest that the pain might not be fully experienced or remembered.

What's interesting is that even when Swofford and Allen acknowledged that babies react to

needle pricks, they still concluded that the age of which pain is first perceived is unknown.

This shows how strong the skepticism about infant pain had become almost no amount of evidence

was seen as conclusive.

A similar view appeared in the 1970 textbook, Elements of Pediatric Anesthesia.

The authors argued that young infants are less sensitive to pain because their brains

are not fully developed.

Although they admitted that babies react to painful stimuli, they described these reactions

as simple reflexes, not proof of real pain.

They even suggested that anesthesia and infants might mainly reduce these reflexes rather

than relieve pain.

This perspective likely influenced medical decisions.

Even though the textbook warned against improper anesthesia practices, its dismissal of infant

pain may have led some doctors to feel justified in not fully anesthetizing babies, especially

given the real risk involved in administering anesthesia to very young infants.

In the 1970s, as when some anesthesiologists chose to use muscle relaxants instead of proper

anesthesia for premature infants, this reduced movement during surgery but did not necessarily

relieve pain as we mentioned earlier.

Some across work was widely accepted, Piper's warnings continued to be largely ignored.

I feel like there's always one person trying to warn us and people just don't listen.

Some speculate that McGraw's ideas were accepted because they were aligned with the existing

beliefs and practices, like I mentioned earlier, because even when some doctors admitted that

infant pain might exist, they often just kept acting like it didn't.

Autosism originally based on limited evidence and caution had hardened into accepted fact.

Some quoted Piper's strong criticism of performing surgery on infants without anesthesia, yet

they still concluded that children rarely needed pain medication and suggested using distraction

and reassurance instead of drugs.

Early infant pain research led to infant pain denial that lasted until the very end of

the 20th century, when parents like Jill Lawson began pushing back against the idea that

their infants could not feel pain.

Jeffrey Lawson became the most famous baby in infant pain management research as his

death marked a turning point, parental activism alongside the rapid growth of pediatric pain

research in the 1980s finally began to challenge the antiquated ideas that had caused the medical

community to be in denial of infant pain for so long.

In 1987, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared it unethical to operate on newborns

without anesthetics.

New ethical standards encouraged more careful and humane research practices and scientists

also became more confident in their ability to measure and study infant pain.

As you know, it's now widely known and accepted that infants do feel pain and fact they may

experience it even more intensely due to immature pain regulation systems.

And research has also found that pain in early life can have lasting effects including increased

sensitivity and anxiety, which if you're like me, may have been wondering how this could

affect those babies later in life and if you go and read it, you'll find stories of

some of those people who were children that were operated on without pain meds and them

telling their stories of how it affected them later on.

Now, I wanted to share one story that I came across and I'm going to have it linked

down below for you guys.

Now this person is using a username, so I'm not sure if it's a man or woman, so I'm

just going to be using he for consistency.

So if you happen to see this later and this is your post and you're a woman, I apologize.

So we talked about something called developmental trauma disorder or DTT.

Now this has not yet been officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, but

it is a proposed diagnosis for children and adolescents who have been exposed to chronic

interpersonal trauma like abuse neglect or family violence during their critical development

period.

It's said to cause pervasive impairment in emotional regulation, attachment, behavior

and self-worth.

Even like PTSD, DTD focuses on developmental impacts often leading to chronic survival

mode behaviors.

Now one of the things that is believed to be able to cause DTD is something like this

extreme pain that these children went through having gone through surgeries without pain

medications.

The Reddit poster says DTD identifies trauma and childhood as having a unique and lasting

imprint on the brain and body.

It has been tied to conditions like heart disease, fibromyalgia, digestive issues, auto

immune disorders and postural conditions.

Understanding these connections can lead to more effective treatments.

DTD is not just psychological, it's an injury to the nervous system affecting people through

their entire adult life.

Now he told his story on here which is truly just heartbreaking.

So I'm going to read it for you guys word for road how he wrote it.

Again this is Reddit and I'll link it for you guys if you want to look at it and follow

the discussion.

But he's telling his experience and he says I was born in 1984 with a misshapen lag and

only three fingers on my left hand.

At six months old, doctors amputated my right foot and used a bone saw to split my left

hand into two fingers.

My record show was highly distressed and shaking uncontrollably in recovery.

At age two, surgeons cut my right femur in half and bolted it back together with metal

pins that stuck out of my skin.

I was placed in a body cast from chest to thighs.

For a toddler, that kind of immobilization is now recognized as highly traumatic.

At age four, doctors tried the same surgery again.

My medical records quote me saying, pain is so bad, cut my leg off.

Feels like it's separating apart, it's moving, it's jumping.

I know for a four year old to be saying that like, oh my gosh, that's so horrific.

Okay, we're going to get back into his words.

There were more surgeries.

Another osteotomy, a growth plate fusion with near death experience, it says, complications

I think you meant complications and a revision amputation.

I never received any trauma care or trauma informed care.

Even into adulthood, no therapist explained why my body started shaking at night or why

phantom pains returned in my amputated leg decades later.

Learning about DTD finally gave me language of what had happened to me.

None of these procedures were neutral, full recovery offense as doctors told my family.

Operating on me so early under the belief that I wouldn't remember the pain called serious

injury to my nervous system.

Now, we also mentioned in the part where he wrote about DTD that many adults don't even

know that they went through these operations as children or babies and that it could be

contributing to their current health issues.

He also talked about how experts are trying to put this on the official diagnosis list

so that more research can be done and so that insurance will recognize and cover treatments.

Today, nearly four decades after Jeffrey Lawson's death, hospitals still struggle with how

to fully ease the pain of young patients.

Many show that infants and children are still sometimes under treated for pain as it's

hard to gauge exactly how much pain they are in.