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Doctors only started accepting the idea that babies experienced pain from vaccine injections and circumcision in the 1980's. Before that, medical wisdom had somehow managed to promote the myth "babies did not experience pain" to allopathic practitioners worldwide. In fact, newborns underwent many routine surgeries without anesthetic before the 1980's because of this misrepresented belief.
As every decade and century passes, the previous misconceptions of conventional medicine are seen as a complete failure, not only in its illogical interpretation of the human body and its physiology, but in the care, interest and advancement of human health.
One of my mentors used to tell me that "you can never know how far down a mountain path you've traveled until you look back." The same can be said for the conventional path to health.
Women Used To Be Put To Sleep To Deliver Babies
As a perfect example, I will remind women that after World War II and until the 1970's, women in labor in the United States (and countless other countries worldwide) were given general anesthesia to put them to sleep while they were delivering their babies. Since women were unable to push the baby out, a physician used forceps, large steel spoons, around the baby's head to pull it out. Most pregnant women would cringe today at the thought of this process, but it was a routine procedure and acceptable for the majority of deliveries. It was not questioned. It was the norm.
Thank goodness midwives started asserting their strength in the early 1970's and began educating women on the dangers of this practice.
The list of incidents and practices propagated by allopathic practitioners and scientific literature is so lengthy that it would take days to recite the countless incompetent realities experienced by millions of victims at the hands of conventional physicians throughout the past few centuries alone.
Babies Don't Feel Pain???
Perhaps the most atrocious and barbaric of these incompetencies persisted in the areas of pediatric health. Specifically, how infants were labeled as incapable of experiencing pain.
The belief was held that the smallest babies were such primitive organisms that they were oblivious to pain. It persisted for decades among many physicians who have routinely operated on these children with little or no anesthesia, including circumcisions and other surgeries.
The practice of withholding pain relief was widespread in the United States and other countries from the 1940's until at least the late 1970's. In one survey of medical literature, 77 percent of all the newborns who underwent surgery throughout the world between 1954 and 1983 to repair a serious blood vessel defect called patent ductus arteriosus received only muscle relaxants or relaxants plus intermittent nitrous oxide.
The failure to relieve pain was a ''barbarous'' and ''nasty business'', according of Dr. John W. Scanlon, director of neonatology at the Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington.
How could a profession dedicated to so-called healing end up inadvertently inflicting needless pain on tiny little babies for several decades?
They phrased the consensus in the scientific literature so it was convincing enough to medical students, who then promoted the myth to parents, families, communities and entire institutions.
A deeper reason for the failure can be found mostly in theoretical assumptions, now regarded as faulty, that allowed ill-founded beliefs about newborns to take root. The notion that babies do not feel pain stems from studies in the 1940's indicating that newborns did not respond to pinpricks by pulling their limbs away as an older infant would.
Unproven Theories
A wide range of unproven theories was voiced to ''explain'' how this was due to an immature nervous system or other physiologic factors. Today, it is recognized that these studies, and others later, had serious flaws. Now doctors know that infants utter unique cries and secrete high levels of stress hormones in response to pain, and that their pain pathways and brain functions are more mature than previously thought.
The understanding of pain in babies was that fetal and newborn unmyelinated nerve fibres were incapable of relaying information at the same speed as myelinated fibres in older children. They assumed that at birth, a baby had developed the neural pathways for nociception and for experiencing pain, but the pain responses were an immature version of older children. Thus, the assumption led to a belief that a baby's threshold for sensitization was substantially decreased because the neural pathways that descended from the brain to the spinal cord were not well developed in the newborn, resulting in the ability of the central nervous system to inhibit pain. The opposite is true today.
Only after parents and other laymen raised a cry about needless suffering, and some filed lawsuits, was there enough pressure to change.
The long failure to provide anesthesia for newborns provides a salutary reminder that medical practices are sometimes based on flimsy science and erroneous beliefs, and that outside critics can bring an important perspective.
Most pediatric specialists today know that a newborn's nervous system may be much more active than that of an adult, in terms of transforming its connections and central nerve pathways in response to stimuli. The ongoing process of neural pathway development, involving both structural and chemical changes of the nervous system, have been shown to be affected by pain events, both in the short term and potentially into adult life.
With the advent of sonograms and live-action ultrasound images, neonatologists and nurses are able to see unborn babies at 20 weeks gestation react physically to outside stimuli such as sound, light and touch. The sense of touch is so acute that even a single human hair drawn across an unborn baby's palm causes the baby to make a fist. Surgeons entering the womb to perform corrective procedures on tiny unborn babies have seen those babies flinch, jerk and recoil from sharp objects and incisions.
"The neural pathways are present for pain to be experienced quite early by unborn babies," explains Steven Calvin, M.D., perinatologist, chair of the Program in Human Rights Medicine, University of Minnesota, where he teaches obstetrics.
Medical Facts of Fetal Pain
Anatomical studies have documented that the body's pain network--the spino-thalamic pathway--is established by 20 weeks gestation.
- "At 20 weeks, the fetal brain has the full complement of brain cells present in adulthood, ready and waiting to receive pain signals from the body, and their electrical activity can be recorded by standard electroencephalography (EEG)."
~ Dr. Paul Ranalli, neurologist, University of Toronto - An unborn baby at 20 weeks gestation "is fully capable of experiencing pain...Without question, [abortion] is a dreadfully painful experience for any infant subjected to such a surgical procedure."
~ Robert J. White, M.D., PhD., professor of neurosurgery, Case Western University
How Pain From a Vaccine Needle or Circumcision Primes The Brain of Infants For Future Trauma
Newborns exposed to painful events such as vaccines or circumcision may affect future pain responses and adaptation to life experiences.
Scandinavian research concluded that trauma in newborn babies contributes to high rates of suicide and drug addiction in teenagers. "We can be imposing on babies patterns of behaviour by what we do to them," says Aynsley Green. "We ought to be looking for long-term consequences than we have been until now."
"Something as simple as a vaccine injection to a newborn creates a new pain set point for that infant...it learns what pain is at an extremely early age which sets up conditioning for the rest of its life," said pain specialist Dr. Ivan Kotchen.
Many procedures including circumcision and heel pricks are wrongly performed without anaesthesia. An international review of 40 studies involving 1157 newborn babies undergoing procedures found that 23 percent were "horrifyingly" given no anaesthesia.
Circumcising baby boys may make them more sensitive to pain. "Circumcised boys had significantly longer crying bouts and higher pain scores," said Dr. Gideon Koren from the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada. "Neo-natal circumcision may affect pain response several months after the event."
Other studies have shown that the body "learns" how to feel pain, and Koren says circumcision -- often a baby boy's first experience of pain -- may prime him for future trauma.
"Because memory of pain is believed to be important in subsequent pain perception it is conceivable that pain from circumcision may have long-lasting effects on pain response and/or perception," he writes.
Most people who follow my work know that I have a very strong opinion about the ineffectiveness of vaccines. What most of my readers don't know is that part of my education of childhood pain is what led me to study the realities of what vaccines do to children.
When it comes to trusting any medical system, I urge every mother, father, parent or guardian out there to please question everything you know to be true when it comes to your health and the health of your children. Never take anything at face value from any expert and always leave any conversation, lesson or reading material with doubt, including this one. Above all else, be true to yourself and trust your instincts. You are your best healer, and that will never change.
Instead of accepting information as fact, we ought to be taught that it is only a figment of knowledge on the edge of the unknown.
~ Forbes, January 11, 1999
Dave Mihalovic is a Naturopathic Doctor who specializes in vaccine research, cancer prevention and a natural approach to treatment.
that the same medical establishment who is currently pushing mood-altering drugs on everyone, calling normal human emotional responses a sign of mental illness, ignoring the connection between vaccines and autism, ignoring data that indicate its current dietary recommendations are causing obesity, whose data shows they are the third or fourth leading cause of death in the US as medical malpractice--this is the medical establishment who supported awarding the 1949 Nobel prize in medicine to a man who popularized lobotomy as a cure for "mental Illness" with a procedure where he pushed an icepick in people's eye sockets and mushed the fronts of their brains! These are the same people who said babies and small children do not feel pain!!!
As a child of five, I accidentally cut my foot in half to the bone and was sewed up in the emergency room without anesthesia with four large adults holding me down as I screamed and writhed in pain--I remember every stitch.
Today these are the same people to whom you are trusting your health to without question????
Do your own research before you submit yourselves or your children to "treatment" and always keep in mind that those who have power and wealth, history proves, will do or say anything to maintain that power regardless of who suffers.