Make them the heel test, an analytical, make him pending, channel a route ... there are several interventions that we carry out with the babies to test them, or in the case of the earrings as a social convention, which cause damage to the little ones that often don't show.
What do we mean by this? Well, when someone says that "they punctured him, but it didn't hurt because he hardly cried" he may not be right and it is more correct to say "he was punctured, but although it hurt, he cried almost nothing." And it is that a new investigation comes to demonstrate something that has been talked about for some time and that it is important to emphasize: some newborns do not cry too much despite suffering pain.
That time when they thought they were not in pain
A few decades ago it was considered that newborns were very immature at the sensory level and were not able to feel pain. Certainly, they are very immature, but now practically nobody thinks they don't feel pain, right? Well, I always like to remember this because at that time babies were operated without anesthesia, with sedation probably, but without eliminating the pain that the intervention could cause (Why add anesthesia, with its side effects, if it doesn't hurt, they should think).
By becoming increasingly aware that they do suffer pain, researchers have studied how to reduce painful tests and practices with babies, so as not to do them unless necessary, and have also sought ways to decrease discomfort: from tetanalgesia, through suction with sucrose, anesthetic cream applied before a puncture, etc.
When it hurts, but they don't express it the same
Pain is very subjective because there is no way to measure it, and from the outside we can only know how much something hurts someone because of their gestures, their complaints and their personal assessment. In medicine, a pain scale called Visual Analog Scale (EVA) a patient is shown to put a number from 1 to 10 to his pain, considering that zero is that nothing hurts and 10 the most terrible pain you can imagine.
But babies are unable to number their pain, so that we can only try to guess how much something hurts because of their responses. The problem? The one that researchers have been finding for years: often it hurts more than they express.
In the study we mentioned, published in the magazine Current Biology, they saw that some babies who were stressed had a stronger brain response to pain, but that their behavior did not prove that it was so.
To do the study, the researchers decided to monitor the brain activity and expressions and grimaces of 56 newborn babies in good health, at the time of doing the heel test. They saw that those who had more basic stress (they had a more rapid heart rate and higher levels of cortisol - stress hormone - higher), reacted more exaggeratedly to the puncture, but only at the cerebral level. His behavior was the same, practically, even though they were suffering major damage.
Laura Jones, a researcher at the University College of London explains it in Medline Plus:
When newborn babies undergo a painful procedure, there is a reasonable and well-coordinated increase in their brain activity and behavioral responses, such as crying and grimacing. Stressed babies have a greater response in the brain after a painful procedure. But, in these babies, this increased brain activity no longer corresponds to their behavior.
Let's think they have pain, even if they don't tell us
Jones and his collaborators concluded the importance of always, always, try to minimize the pain of babies, because they may be suffering even if they don't tell us, or they may be suffering a lot even if it seems that it hurts little.
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