As recently as the mid-1980s, some physicians thought infants couldn't feel pain as well as adults because their nervous systems were underdeveloped. Even today some doctors use little or no pain medication because they fear it is unsafe for young children, or that older children might become addicted to it. Plus, they reason, children heal quickly anyway. When Russ was 4 years old, the same surgeon planned to remove a stomach tube without medication, so his mother mixed Tylenol and Valium for him at home. It seemed to help.
Few parents feel compelled to go to such extremes.
But it's difficult to watch a child undergo a painful procedure without any relief. Research has shown that children are often undermedicated. A study in 1968 showed that only 15 percent of children in a hospital's intensive care unit received any type of narcotics for pain, and only 3 percent received pain medicine after surgery. A 1992 study reported that infants received less than half the number of doses of pain medication that adults did after open heart surgery. One problem is that children can't describe their pain in words that nurses and doctors understand.