Tag Archives: pain

Randomized controlled trials are the bedrock of evidence-based medicine. If a treatment has a good theoretical rationale, and preclinical data showing efficacy, the only way to prove efficacy in the human is to randomise patients to the treatment, compared to … Continue reading →

Just imagine for a moment that you are the parent of Jo, who is 4 years old, Jo has a sudden onset of breathlessness and the investigations in the Emergency Room show a spontaneous pneumothorax, that needs a drain. You … Continue reading →

Unethical pain studies are still being published, in journals which include several from mainstream publishing houses. In these studies published recently and appearing on-line in recent weeks, newborn infants were assigned by the researchers to experience pain. The reviewers of … Continue reading →

If you are performing a study of pain control in the newborn and you assign babies to untreated controls, you are creating unnecessary avoidable pain in the control patients. That is true for any patient who is incompetent, obviously including … Continue reading →

Carlo Bellieni and Celeste Johnston (Conflict of Interest flag, I have collaborated with both of them) have just reviewed a couple of recent years research of analgesic interventions in the newborn. Of 46 randomized studies of painful procedures, 70% had … Continue reading →