Analgesic technique

Pain therapy

The fact that babies experience pain is a widely accepted idea. The question is if they just feel pain or suffer. This is a very important question  for our analgesic approach: do we need to stop the transmission of the stimulus or also prevent pain associated stress? We can use the sensory abilities of the newborn to relieve pain through a technique of sensory stimulation. Its name is Sensorial Saturation (SS) and it consists on  distracting and comforting the infant through a massage, the eyes contact, the speech and the use of a sweet substance on the tongue. It is demonstrated that the SS decreases pain levels more than a simple  sugar administration during blood sampling.

Two examples of blood sampling are showed below.  The procedure could be very painful for the baby but using sensorial saturation we can decrease unpleasant sensations.