I’m working on an article for a magazine touching on pain management during post-surgical extubation, and once again I find myself freshly disturbed by how difficult it is to get good data about PAIN during extubation (and many other procedures) because the dominant culture in “pain management” cares so little about pain itself. They often care exclusively about preventing memories of pain, rather than preventing… pain.
A paper I read today[1] says: “Many of the patients exhibited severe bucking or similar bodily movements, raising concerns that they might retain memories of discomfort on extubation. However, given their low frequency, such memories were considered to be of negligible importance.”
This paper collects numbers on how many of the patients can recall their “discomfort” later. But they do not bother to collect numbers on how many patients exhibited signs of that “discomfort” in the first place. It would have been so easy to just give me a number on how many patients were “bucking”, but no. They only say “many.”
They treat the natural denominator—how many patients were, in fact, exhibiting signs of pain—as irrelevant. To them all that matters is whether you remember it.
The authors say, “Immediately before extubation, patients often exhibit signs that suggest that they are awake and experiencing discomfort. There is concern that patients may retain such memories of the extubation process.”
There is concern patients may retain such memories? How about some concern that the patients are in pain in the first place? Can we get a little concern for that?
In theory, of course, it is legitimate for an individual paper to focus on studying memory rather than studying pain.
But in fact, the concern demonstrated in this paper is the dominant one in the culture. In the anesthesia and pain management worlds, “I’m concerned they’ll remember this” is treated as the appropriate professional substitute for “I’m concerned they’re in pain” SO OFTEN. If you spend time with the anesthesia literature—it doesn’t even have to be a lot of time—you will start noticing this pattern everywhere. You’ll notice memory of pain being implicitly treated as synonymous with pain itself, while pain itself is ignored. You’ll notice that even in texts purporting to study/discuss pain itself, the tone and even sometimes the structure often betrays an implicit philosophical assumption that pain, even extreme pain, is morally irrelevant so long as it is kept properly non-disruptive and liability-free and sequestered from patient satisfaction surveys. There is a refrain one often hears from critical care staff and anesthesiologists, “Pain is not an emergency,” and you will start to notice how the entire field, including the research side, is marinated in this philosophical assumption. And the fact that this philosophical assumption is so pervasive and relatively unquestioned makes it difficult to even document the existence of the problems it creates, since it prevents the development of would-be-relevant research.
Their conclusion begins: “Recall of discomfort during extubation appears to be rare, and the great majority of patients may not retain any memory of the extubation process. This information may be used to reassure patients”
You can make of that what you will. Me? I’m not reassured.
- ^
Again, to be clear, I am not arguing that THIS PAPER on its own is necessarily like, bad or evil, but rather that the culture of the field has been dragged to a very dark philosophical place, and this paper is but one tiny data point that serves as a representative example of where the field’s focus now lies. Obviously it is difficult to prove “a mostly not-explicit but very harmful cultural tendency to focus on the wrong thing is happening”, so you’ll just have to wait until the bigger article comes out to see me take my best stab at actually proving that, heh.
HEY I just realized I’ve never posted publicly about something I think is pretty important, that I try to tell all my loved ones.
Unfortunately I think tattoos might give you cancer. I don’t think we know for certain whether it’s causal, but I think there’s a pretty good chance it is.
Big study on it:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38827888/
I’m extremely grateful that my surgeon alerted me to this study before I got a second tattoo. I’m pretty bummed about not being able to get the huge tower crane chest piece / left sleeve that I wanted, but I’m even more happy not to have a heightened risk of lymphoma. Let your loved ones know!