#79. Pain Amongst Neonates, Infants and Young Children

Sep 9, 2021

There's no better way to kick off September as the Pain Awareness Month than bringing you a conversation with Dr. Kanwaljeet S. Anand, whose research took the medical world by storm, even risking his license, as he sought out to answer the question of; what if we give children anesthesia and analgesia? 

I truly believe that he is the reason why my career as a pediatric pain and palliative care physician exists today and serves as an available path for many healthcare professionals.

In this episode,  Dr.  Anand, a professor of Pediatrics, Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, describes his groundbreaking research back in the 80s, when a popular held belief was that babies don’t feel pain! 

With the findings  and intervention offered in his RCT, they were able to cut down the infant mortality rates by half.  It is the work of doctors like him that paved the path for someone like me to practice pediatric pain management as a specialty-- hoping to save and improve the lives of many more children by debunking the fallacies that still surround children's pain and its management.

 

Takeaways In This Episode

 

• What fueled Dr. Anand’s desire to research perioperative care for infants
• His hypothesis around morbidity and mortality of neonates and infants undergoing surgeries, relationship to anesthetic management 
• Conducting the randomized controlled trial study and its results that changed the history and trajectory of childrens pain and perioperative management
• Sometimes it’s worth picking the fights
• How his study gained momentum and changed how the healthcare world approaches pain management for children and infants
• When and how infants develop the ability to feel pain
• The long-term consequences of poorly or inadequately  managing children’s pain
• Changing the minds of colleagues who perpetuate the belief that children are “hardy” and will “get over it”
• Dr. Anand’s message to the audience

 

Links

Connect with Dr. Kanwaljeet S. Anand:

Stanford Profile

LinkedIn

Love, Pain, and Intensive Care. K.J.S. Anand, Richard W. Hall

Clinicians’ Pain Evaluation Toolkit

Proactive Pain Solutions

 

About the Guest 

 

Kanwaljeet S. Anand, MBBS, MD, D Phil, FRCCM

 

He is currently the professor of Pediatrics, Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. He directs the pain and stress neurobiology lab, the Jackson Vaughan Critical Care Research Fund, and he serves as the Editor of the journal Pediatric Research and is the Division Chief for Pediatric Critical Care at the Department of Pediatrics at Standford School of Medicine.

He graduated from M.G.M. Medical College, Indore (India). He received the D.Phil. degree as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, a categorical Pediatrics residency training at Boston Children's Hospital, and a Critical Care Medicine fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

He is the recipient of innumerable awards, including the Dr. Michael Blacow Award from the British Pediatric Association in 1986, the Pediatric Resident Research Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the inaugural Young Investigator Award in Pediatric Pain from the International Association for Study of Pain in 1994, the Jeffrey Lawson Award for advocacy of children's pain relief, the highest recognition in pediatric pain medicine in the United States. He's also been awarded many awards across Europe in many countries such as the Nils Rosén von Rosenstein Award from the Swedish Academy of Medicine and the 2015 Journées Nationales de Néonatologie Address at The Pasteur Institute to name a few.

For his dedication and work in the field of pediatric pain management, he is considered a world authority on pain and stress in newborns and pain management in infants.