Until then, most doctors believed that newborn infants had immature nervous systems that prevented them from feeling pain and that even older children did not remember pain. As a result, babies as old as 18 months underwent invasive procedures, including surgery, without being put to sleep. Doctors also hesitated to use narcotics in children because they feared the drugs would cause respiratory problems and addiction. Recent discoveries in developmental science show just how cruel that was. And even when children cannot remember the actual experience of pain, it seems to get permanently recorded at a biological level.
Doctors now have more liberty to fight children's pain with drugs.
Fears of addiction have proved unfounded, although doctors monitor a child's vital signs carefully when using sedatives such as morphine or fentanyl. And better drugs have joined the arsenal. Drugs are far from the only answer, however. Leora Kuttner, a psychologist at British Columbia's Children's Hospital in Vancouver, has spent her career proving the value of such techniques as distraction, hypnosis, meditation, controlled breathing, and fantasy to ease pain during medical procedures. When she was about 7, she met Kuttner and became part of a pain control study.