As an American living in the twentieth century, I can state with certainty that one of the biggest things we pride ourselves on is our technological superiority and advances in healthcare. That is why I was so shocked to learn that most infants who receive circumcisions in the United States go under the knife with no anesthesia of any kind. The explanation for this, although archaic, is understandable from a medical standpoint. The main reason that it took so long for someone to test these theories is because there are very rarely any complications with infant circumcisions, so the medical community looked at the problem with the attitude of "if it's not broke, don't fix it". Luckily though for our future children someone finally did take the chance to try to prove the medical community wrong and disprove the objections for anesthesia.

One of the reasons that many doctors don't use anesthesia is because they believe that the application of anesthesia would be medically harmful for the baby because of the types of drugs that would be necessary to use. Although a valid concern, this belief has been proven by scientists to be false. In two different Clinical trials where lidocaine w

This article helped me by going very in depth about the study that was done and explaining the major differences between the reactions of newborns who have the procedure done either with or without lidocane.

1. Ring Block Anesthesia wins the kindest cut of all. Vol.34, Medical Post, 01-27-1998, pp 40. This article was very informative and was interesting because it already operated under the assumption that infants do feel the pain of the circumcision so instead of focusing on that it instead concentrated on the different types of anesthesia and which worked the best.

Another strong belief that has actually been around since early times is that infants won't remember pain or cannot really feel anything because of underdeveloped nerve pathways. This belief is understandable because the doctors had no way of knowing that infants could feel pain since there was no basis for comparison. Once they did finally compare these infants to one's who were anesthized, the difference was so astonishing that one group of researchers actually stopped their experiment midway because they needed no more data. The conclusion that they came to is that infants can and do feel the pain of the circumcisions. Although the infant's vital signs in the two groups were not to statistically different, the difference in crying rates and types were drama

Some common words found in the essay are:
Infant Circumcision, Journal AMA, Medical Post, Pediatric Nursing, Marvel Circumcision, Medical Association, Block Anesthesia, feel pain, infants feel pain, infants feel, ring block, ring block anesthesia, penile nerve block, dorsal penile nerve, medical community, penile nerve, heart rate, beats baseline, dorsal penile, gomco clamp, nerve block,
Approximate Word count = 959
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)