The Good: You rip a bandage off of a small child and his scream brings tears to your eyes. Imagine doing that every day, except the bandage covers more than 50% of his body. This is the sorrow that burn center nurses must face everyday. Traditionally, these nurses would pull of bandages with nothing more than a radio, a book, or a TV program to distract the wailing child. Now, state of the art technology that utilizes virtual reality. The children who reside in the burn unit don a helmet during bandaging or checking of their wounds and they live out a little virtual reality world. Head to head tests against traditional distraction methods shows that virtual reality works, and lets kids escape the pain, if only for a minute. This is what we should be developing our technology for. Kudos to innovative hospitals.

The Bad: I previously wrote about how infants in the US basically get the short end of the stick, and now I have even more proof. A recent study showed that newborns feel pain. Not only do they feel the pain, but it is more intense and more traumatizing than it is for older children, making pain a dangerous game. The number one source of people who hurt babies is believe it or not, is the neonatal intensive care unit that many infants spend their first hospital days in.

A study on the hospital intensive care unit showed that babies in the unit underwent painful procedures without anesthesia an average of 16 times a day. Things like heel sticks, throat and nasal suctioning, and more are both common and helpful, but cause newborns a great deal of pain and suffering. When you really think about it, it makes sense, painkillers are dangerous for babies, so avoiding them would be good. Sadly though this can hurt the babies to the point that their pain management when they get older can be impaired. So mom-to-be, keep your baby as close to full term as you can so that you don’t also force your newborn to this fate.