Pain experienced by newborn babies, such as from common painful medical procedures, could increase their sensitivity to pain later in life.
Based on experiments in rats, researchers think that the painful experiences could change the baby's developing nervous system.
Researchers injected the paws of newborn rats with an irritant that caused pain and swelling for five days.
Later as adults, the rats showed a higher degree of sensitivity in the paws that had been exposed to pain.
Researchers also looked at the number of nerve endings that grew from the hind paw and connected to the spinal cord, and found that the tested animals had more nerve endings than the control animals, which may have provided more means for pain information to be transmitted.
Researchers state that "Ultimately we want to try and determine the mechanism for the growth of the nerve fibers -- -than we could might be able to avoid creating these additional pain pathways in infants."
Science July 28, 2000;289;628-630.
Most of us have no clue how defenseless a newborn baby is. Most of the emotional wounding that causes the chronic illness in the people I care for is a result of trauma that occurred prior to the age of six. Below the age of six one does not have enough of a sense of self to separate truth from reality. The younger the child the less the defenses and the more severe the wounding. These emotions are stored in the limbic portion of the brain and tend to have profound influences on the autonomic nervous system which controls just about every part of the body. When one is chronically ill, these are the wounds that need to be transformed if one is to achieve optimal wellness.