17,055
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
→Child circumcision as a traumatizing event: Wikify.
===Child circumcision as a traumatizing event===
When an infant boy is to be circumcised, it is the usual practice to immobilize the infant for the [[Pain| painful]] surgery by securely tying his limbs to a molded plastic board specially made for that purpose. The infant thus is preventing from fighting or fleeing, which is the [[trauma]]-producing situation of ''inescapable [[shock]]'', described as a "physical condition in which the organism cannot do anything to affect the inevitable."<ref name="vanderkolk2014B">{{REFbook
|last=van der Kolk
|first=Bessel
Taddio et al. (1997) concluded:
<blockquote>
Although postsurgical central sensitisation (allodynia and hyperalgesia) can extend to sites of the body distal from the wound, suggesting a supraspinal effect, the long-term consequences of surgery done without anaesthesia are likely to include post-traumatic stress as well as [[pain]]. It is, therefore, possible that the greater vaccination response in the infants circumcised without anaesthesia may represent an <u>infant analogue of a post-traumatic stress disorder</u> triggered by a traumatic and painful event and re-experienced under similar circumstances of pain during vaccination.<ref name="taddio1997" />
</blockquote>