The Effect of Infant Circumcision

            Infant Circumcision: Can they really feel it?.

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 that 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 to 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 was injected into the penis of the infants, there was no sign of bleeding, swelling or hematomas at the site of the injection after the surgery was completed. As for the baby”s reaction to the drug, “there was no sign of postoperative vital sign abnormalities, no skin changes, no depressed spinal reflex activity, and no delayed recovery of penile sensation” (Williamson 5). All of the baby”s did quite well with the medication and there is not expected to be any future signs of complications.
Another strong belief that has actually been around since early times is that infants won”t remember the pain or cannot really feel anything because of underdeveloped nerve pathways.