Children Can Greatly Reduce Abdominal Pain By Using Their Imagination: UNC Study

Children Can Greatly Reduce Abdominal Pain By Using Their Imagination: UNC Study: "
Children with functional abdominal pain who used audio recordings of guided imagery at home in addition to standard medical treatment were almost three times as likely to improve their pain problem, compared to children who received standard treatment alone.

And those benefits were maintained six months after treatment ended
[....]

The study focused on functional abdominal pain, defined as persistent pain with no identifiable underlying disease that interferes with activities. It is very common, affecting up to 20 percent of children. Prior studies have found that behavioral therapy and guided imagery (a treatment method similar to self-hypnosis) are effective, when combined with regular medical care, to reduce pain and improve quality of life.
[....]
In the group that used guided imagery, the children reported that the CDs were easy and enjoyable to use. In that group, 73.3 percent reported that their abdominal pain was reduced by half or more by the end of the treatment course. Only 26.7 percent in the standard medical care only group achieved the same level of improvement. This increased to 58.3 percent when guided imagery treatment was offered later to the standard medical care only group. In both groups combined, these benefits persisted for six months in 62.5 percent of the children.
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Pain in infants and very young children

Interesting. Though, as always, these neurological facts don't by themselves entail any ethical conclusions. Of course, it would be nice to see standard practice err on the side of preventing as much pain as is clinically feasible.

"Pain, Hurt, and Harm: The Ethics of Pain Control in Infants and Children" in The New England Journal of Medicine (Vol. 331.8):

Many myths about pain in children have been discredited. One myth was the belief that very young infants do not have the neurologic capacity to experience pain. Neuroanatomical studies, however, have shown that by 29 weeks of gestation, pain pathways and the cortical and subcortical centers involved in the perception of pain are well developed, as are the neurologic systems for the transmission and modulation of painful sensations 15. Behavioral16,17 and physiologic18 studies have shown that even very young infants respond to painful stimuli. Premature infants undergoing surgery with minimal anesthesia, which was once standard practice, have significantly higher stress responses (by hormonal and metabolic measures) and significantly higher rates of complications and mortality than those given deeper anesthesia.19,20

A related misunderstanding is the belief that even if very young children experience pain, they have no memory of it, and therefore it has no lasting effect. However, recent studies have concluded that pain and distress, such as those associated with circumcision, can endure in memory, resulting, for example, in disturbances of feeding, sleeping, and the stability of the state of arousal.21 Preliminary data even suggest that early experiences of pain may produce permanent structural and functional reorganization of developing nociceptive neural pathways, which in turn may affect future experiences of pain.22