Kids can suffer pain as much as any adult—even though not all pediatricians recognize the breadth of the problem. Fortunately, awareness and treatment are improving.
in 2000, 10-year-old Ashley Goodall was sitting with her parents in an urgent-care center in Bakers- field, California, waiting for a physician to relieve the terrible pain in her right arm. More than a decade later, Goodall still can’t shake the gruesome image of her arm that day: “The limb looked almost dead. It was weird. It felt like someone was holding it un- der ice water,” she recalls. While in the examining room, she happened to overhear doctors discussing her case. An infection, they believed, was cutting off circulation to the little girl’s arm and the best option for treatment was amputation. Just then, an orthopedic surgeon rushed into the
room, waving a pamphlet on complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS). Then largely unknown, CRPS, a.k.a. reflex sympathetic dystrophy, is a neurological disorder that can follow an injury. It causes a body part to become increasingly sensitive to pain; sensa- tions as light as wind or vibration can be excruciating. It turned out that CRPS was to blame for Goodall’s pain; she had hurt her arm weeks earlier playing
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basketball. But the diagnosis still wasn’t enough to convince all of her doctors that her pain was real. “All those years I was mistreated by doctors,” Good- all says. “Many thought it was just in my head.” It may seem hard to believe that just 12 years ago it wasn’t uncommon to find pediatricians who dismissed chronic pain in kids. Even today, some continue to believe that babies, children and teens don’t feel pain the way adults do, in spite of years of research dem- onstrating that little ones do suffer.
Past vs. present Over the past decade the research on pain in children
has been clear: Children experience many of the same types of pain that grown-ups do, including headaches, migraines, digestive problems, rheuma- toid arthritis, back pain, fibromyalgia and other con- ditions that bring on the hurt. But as in Goodall’s case, not all doctors know that. A 2003 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that this scientific evidence that kids do hurt doesn’t al- ways translate to pediatricians’ daily practice. Rough- ly 20 percent of children suffer from some type of chronic pain that goes untreated, according to a 2009 report by the Mayday Fund, a foundation dedicated to pain issues. Why the discrepancy, even today? “Chronic pediatric pain violates our view of child- hood as something that’s always carefree,” says clin- ical psychologist Patrick McGrath, Ph.D., a pediatric pain specialist and vice president of research at IWK