17 ms·
This is, I believe, one of the downsides of empiricism and the fixation on citation rather than observation and reason. The idea that a whole profession came to
by BitwiseFool 4y ago
This is, I believe, one of the downsides of empiricism and the fixation on citation rather than observation and reason. The idea that a whole profession came to reject the idea that infants are able to feel pain is astonishing, especially considering anyone who has ever taken care of infants knows that these little human beings react to things which are known to be painful. Babies feeling pain is something that should be self-evident, shouldn't it? It may not be empirically evident, but decisions can still be made without such metrics.
Don't get me wrong, empiricism and citation is valuable. However, a myopic focus on it enables some very twisted conclusions.
- kzrdude 4y agoI absolutely agree. I think there are many factors that make people look aside. We “believe” what’s convenient to us. What immediately comes to mind - and I’m a meat-eater - is eating meat and harming animals. For animals, we tell ourselves what we need so that we can continue eating meat.
- anonu 4y agoTrue. Lobotomies used to be common practice as well. Even a surgery performed recently, UPPP, for treating sleep apnea is "no longer recommended"... It was only five or ten years ago where they would perform this incredibly invasive surgery, but enough research shows they're not that effective.
- RobertRoberts 4y agoYou are proving the OP's point. Cutting off your uvula? It sounds insane to me, and I wouldn't have the procedure even if a doctor recommended it to me. There are so many totally insane medical practices that it's shocking we don't question the medical industry as a rule of thumb. Another one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_infection_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_infection_theory
- saurik 4y ago> You are proving the OP's point. That would seem to be why they left the comment, so: mission successful.
- RobertRoberts 4y agoNo, the post was attempting to demonstrate how the medical system is effective and works as intended by correcting the use of UPPP, when any sane rational person would never have suggested in the first place.
- diob 4y agoGrateful I turned that shit down in 2012. Even then the evidence against it was overwhelming (basically, it makes sleep apnea worse because scar tissue comes back fierce).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Spoom 4y agoI get the impression that a lot of gynecological care is in the same realm, but I don't have the equipment to have first hand anecdotal evidence. Heard many a horror story about IUD placement / removal, where folks were told that a Tylenol would be enough.
- bad416f1f5a2 4y agoMedical racism and sexism are very real. One in four residents believe blacks have thicker skin than whites: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1516047113 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1516047113
- 9991 4y agoAnd? Is it true?
- jacobolus 4y agoFrom a brief skim of the literature, the main difference seems to be that darker skin is better protected against aging effects from sun exposure, and better maintains its elasticity (etc.) when exposed to ultraviolet radiation over decades. But less research than might be expected has been done about other differences between the skin of different groups. * * * > There exists substantial evidence to support that Black skin has a higher transepidermal water loss, variable blood vessel reactivity, decreased skin surface pH, and larger mast cell granules compared with White skin. Although some deductions have been made about Asian and Hispanic skin, further evaluation needs to be done. Differences in water content, corneocyte desquamation, elastic recovery/extensibility, lipid content and skin microflora, although statistically significant, are inconclusive. https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00128071-200304120-00004 https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00128071-200304120... > The thickness of the skin is higher on the cheek compared with the dorsal and ventral forearm, with no ethnic or age-related specificity. We confirm that the sub-epidermal non-echogenic band is a sensitive marker of skin aging, and reveal for the first time that it is less pronounced in African Americans. From OCT images, we bring out evidence that the thickness of the dermal–epidermal junction (DEJ) decreased with age, and was higher in African Americans than in Caucasians. Finally, by comparing US images at 150 MHz with OCT images, we show that papillary dermis thickness can be measured and appears to be quite constant irrespective of age or ethnic group. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1600-0846.2009.00365.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1600-0846... > Skin roughness, scaliness and stratum corneum hydration varied significantly in different anatomic areas and age groups. There was no racial variation in skin hydration between any anatomic site, nor significant differences in roughness and scaliness between races, except for the preauricular area. Skin roughness was significantly increased in the aged, compared to the young at the preauricle, volar forearm, lower back, thigh and lower leg. Older women demonstrated significantly more scaling at the preauricle than younger women. Stratum corneum hydration correlated with scaliness. No significant correlation between stratum corneum hydration and skin roughness was observed. https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/17932 https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/17932
- kif 4y agoWhat is considered to be the best treatment for apnea these days? Is it ESP, or something else? Besides CPAP of course.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- o_____________o 4y agoThere are some pretty interesting procedures like MSE that aim to expand your skull internally by putting lateral outward pressure on your palate. The immediate effects are a new gap between your two front teeth and greatly expanded breathing capacity. Hopefully. People have various ways of describing the moment two parts of your internal skull bits separate, once described as "radiant pleasure without actual pleasure"
- kif 4y agoI can't believe I hadn't heard about this before. Looks very intriguing.
- jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 4y agoLosing weight.
- Broken_Hippo 4y agoThat's only if your weight is the cause.
- jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 4y ago"Some 60–90% of adults with OSA are overweight" https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/31/Supplement_2/S303/24789/Abdominal-Fat-and-Sleep-ApneaThe-chicken-or-the https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/31/Supplement_2/S3...
- 4y ago
- happytoexplain 4y agoI feel like it's the opposite - that, historically, many people (regardless of profession) always generally assumed that certain living things did not feel pain or otherwise suffer for some definition of suffering. This status quo naturally persisted into the era of science until science demonstrated it to be wrong in this case. Should they have known better, sooner? Obviously - I don't fully comprehend what could lead to such a bizarre and terrible assumption. But the problem seems to predate the age of empiricism and medical science.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Enginerrrd 4y agoYou can see this all the time right now. People always talk about dogs as though they are philosophical zombies that merely learned to imitate the emotional displays we see from them. I see people talking about animals frequently caveat their intuition by saying things like "I'm sure he's just learned that if he does that he'll get food" or the like. But the notion that fellow mammals which evolved to live in social groups don't experience any of the same emotions we do despite using the same brain structures in the same contexts is absolutely insane to me. They clearly experience even fairly complex emotions like jealousy of their peers. I can give my child a snack that my dog likes and it's no big deal. But if I were to give the cat that same treat and not my dog, she will flip her shit. Another dog would be similarly. In fact, my dog will jealously guard a treat she doesn't even like from the cat or another dog. Like she won't even eat it in a neutral context. But in the jealousy eliciting context, she will take it and bring it somewhere and guard it. Like it's insane to me that people think the entire range of our emotions and thoughts evolved solely in humans. There are other social mammals and have been for a long time.
- bscphil 4y agoI see those as two basically different phenomena: 1. Is X capable of feeling pain / sentient? 2. Is X capable of having emotions? It seems probable that (1) is a precondition of (2), such that we should not be surprised if there are sentient creatures (perhaps including dogs) that are capable of feeling pain, are intelligent, and able to produce apparently emotional displays without having evolved the underlying experience of emotion. Human emotions are complex and came about as the result of a long period of evolution with an intricate social system built on top of it. The emotions that e.g. dogs show are the result of a few-thousand year history of humans selectively rewarding a particular animal for displaying a certain behavior. It is, IMO, beyond the pale to suggest that animals like dogs don't experience pain or have subjective experience. (And the same goes for pigs, cows, and most other vertebrates.) That would come as a surprise to some rather intelligent historical figures like Descartes. I don't think it's similarly strange to think that these animals don't experience emotions in quite the same way we do, or that an apparent display of "sorrow" doesn't map 1:1 to an internal experience of sorrow in the way we might expect.
- treis 4y ago>little human beings react to things which are known to be painful. Babies feeling pain is something that should be self-evident, shouldn't it Perhaps this is just semantics, but I think "feeling pain" implies a higher level of cognition than simply reacting to things which are known to be painful. Like the classic toddler move of painting with their feces. They're obviously physically capable of smell but it just doesn't seem to register the same way.
- asiachick 4y agosmell being good/bad seems to me to be learned? Go to Taiwan and smell stinky tofu 臭豆腐. To most non-Taiwanese it smells like cat poop or sewer water. Eating it as a non-fan feels like I'm eating in a dirty public restroom where the food itself doesn't taste bad but the smell from the over full toilet next to me is off putting. Similarly shrimp paste. Many cheeses also smell pretty bad. All of them stop smelling so bad once you train yourself to enjoy them. Is the smell of poop any different?
- Spooky23 4y agoGood point. I used to work on a dairy farm. Poop didn’t register after awhile.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> smell being good/bad seems to me to be learned? Go to Taiwan and smell stinky tofu 臭豆腐. I don't understand your example. The name of the item explicitly identifies it as smelling bad.
- pjscott 4y agoAnd if you go to Taiwan and look around, empirically you can see that people try to avoid being immediately downwind of a stinky tofu cart. (It’s pretty tasty, mind you, but IMO not worth the hassle.)
- asiachick 4y agoSure, but what about other examples. Tons of people like blue cheese. But it smells bad. It doesn't have "smells bad" in the name. Neither does "durian" 榴莲
- QuadmasterXLII 4y agoWe should find sympathy for the doctors here. Administering general anesthesia to a newborn was a terrifying and deadly prospect at the time, so it was much easier to find a way to pretend it was unnecessary - certainly many of these surgeries had to happen one way or another for the baby to survive.
- mike00632 4y agoI'm afraid it's the case that most all surgeries on infants (circumcision) are elective and performed for aesthetic reasons. For males it's likely they only time they will go into shock from pain during their lives.
- FredPret 4y agoAbsolute barbarism
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoI find it sad, how people universally agree that female genital mutilation is bad, because cutting off parts for no medical reason is bad.... but then do the same thing to boys, "just because".
- the_af 4y agoI think it's barbaric for boys too.
- wutbrodo 4y agoMost people don't have anything remotely close to what you'd call "beliefs", so no consistency is required between one pseudo-belief they might hold and another.
- Sharlin 4y agoWell, people don't universally agree that FGM is bad because there are people who practice FGM. Also, most people think MGM is… if not barbaric, at least weird, but are somewhat lenient in the name of religious tolerance. The US is the extremely weird outlier.
- lisper 4y ago> Babies feeling pain is something that should be self-evident, shouldn't it? We need to be careful here. Just because a system responds to painful stimulus does not necessarily mean that it "feels pain". Consider this: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/google-places-engineer-on-leave-after-he-claims-groups-chatbot-is-sentient/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/google-places-engine... Or this: https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-people-demanded-privacy-to-confide-in-the-worlds-first-chatbot https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-people-demanded-privacy-to-con... Or this: https://junkerhq.net/MGS2/MarkIII.html https://junkerhq.net/MGS2/MarkIII.html People tend to instinctively anthropomorphize, and this instinct is particularly strong when it comes to our offspring. Just because it seems conscious doesn't necessarily mean that it is.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago>"People tend to instinctively anthropomorphize, and this instinct is particularly strong when it comes to our offspring." I don't want to come across as snide when I ask this, but why would it be wrong to anthropomorphize a fellow human being?
- ibejoeb 4y agoIt doesn't even make sense. What would it mean to anthropomorphize a human? It is a given and can't be fairly characterized like that. The only way to characterize it otherwise is to dehumanize.
- drpyser22 4y agoI guess the word "anthropomorphise" here is conflating many understanding of "human" and humanity. In the same way, is a bunch of cells, an embryon or just a tissue sample, a human? Is an organ a human? Is a developing fetus a human? How many properties do each share with a typical example of a human? There's a spectrum of biological complexity and other attributes we associate with the idea of "human". The question then is where does a baby fit on that spectrum. The general idea of anthropomorphising, here, is to attribute characteristics and experience that we only know from our own experience as conscious, self-aware creatures capable of complex cognition and complex communication of that experience.
- jnovek 4y ago“Babies feeling pain is something that should be self-evident, shouldn't it?” I have yet to understand the historical underpinnings of this phenomenon, but as someone who deals with chronic pain, doctors don’t seem to be aware that people feel pain _in general_. I’m being sort of facetious, but any chronic pain community is full to the brim with stories of various medical professionals being skeptical of patients’ pain reports or treating pain like it’s not a particularly important quality of life concern. I have my own stories about this, of course, and some of them are pretty horrible. It doesn’t surprise me, then, that we assumed at some point that infants don’t feel pain: after all, if we don’t take the pain of adult humans seriously, then why would we consider the pain of a creature who cannot even directly complain about it?
- Spooky23 4y agoThe likelihood of someone understanding something is inversely proportional to the impact on their ability to pay the mortgage. Pain is recognized as “bad” innately. So if you can assert that no pain exists, you’re not accountable for causing, preventing or doing anything about it.
- pwillia7 4y agoDoctors caring at all about pain is relatively new. When medicine started it was just about keeping you alive not keeping you out of pain.[1] There is a fantastic book that is half about the history of pain medicine and half about a small region in mexico that distributes a lot of the heroin in the US. Dreamland[2] [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6311547/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6311547/ [2]:https://www.amazon.com/Dreamland-True-Americas-Opiate-Epidemic-ebook/dp/B00U19DTS0 https://www.amazon.com/Dreamland-True-Americas-Opiate-Epidem...
- politician 4y agoIndividual doctors are rarely deserving of the implicit trust and praise they receive from proximity to the stereotypical hero doctor on this season's popular medical drama. I went from a general naive faith in the profession to caveat emptor.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> anyone who has ever taken care of infants knows that these little human beings react to things which are known to be painful. > It may not be empirically evident These two sentences contradict each other.
- forgingahead 4y agoSome of the most aggravating people you can meet are those that respond to common sense observations with "citation please".
- Salgat 4y agoThe argument is not whether they react to stimulus we consider painful, but if they feel it in a way that mature humans understand as pain. Babies take months just to understand that they have hands, they're incredibly simple minded, so the question was whether they even had a real concept of pain beyond "stimulus and instinctual reaction". Similar to how an insect will react to pain but it's just doing what it's programmed to do, there's no higher level thinking associated with it.
- carpo 4y agoI don't think you need to understand what suffering is to feel it.
- dpierce9 4y agoCompletely agree. I suspect this wasnt just empiricism, it was also behaviorism which purported to be empirically based but added in a theoretically motivated (and ultimately empirically unsupported) skepticism about using minds to explain the observations of animals. If you don’t think babies have minds and pain is a mental state then this insane position follows quite logically.
- parentheses 4y agoSV and tech in general too often romanticize hyper-rational-ness. It's both good and bad. Bad in situations like this.
- aaron695 4y ago
- rscho 4y ago> Babies feeling pain is something that should be self-evident, shouldn't it? Culturally speaking, this is a very narrow-minded interpretation.
- lloydatkinson 4y agoIt’s the same kind of insane lack of critical thinking that led people to be being buried alive because no one thought to check for the existence of a heartbeat despite heartbeats being known about since… forever
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoI believe it's the same with animal consciousness and intelligence. It should be self evident. Not that it mirror ours, but that they have something of a similar nature. You have to remember that centuries ago, some humans assumed black people where, in fact, not human. Not having a soul. Not feeling pain as we do. I remember the testimony of a person stating he once saw an African white master asking her black servant to check if electricity was on... by touching the wire. To her, they were not sensible enough to care.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y agoThe thing that bothered me the most wasn't the awareness of pain in babies, it wqs the answer "they won't remember" when I mentioned the pain argument. WTF.