Doctors question ethics of needles for children

From the National Post:
With Canada on the brink of one of its largest-ever vaccination drives, a group of academics and doctors is urging health-care workers to make flu and other shots less painful for children, suggesting it is actually "unethical " for them to ignore the sting of injections.

Many doctors and parents believe a needle is nothing to fret about, with the hurt lasting only a moment and leaving no long-term effects, the researchers acknowledge in a series of medical-journal papers just published.

Using one of several possible pain-reduction techniques, however, could help avert needle phobias that affect as much as 10% of the population, last years and undermine vaccination campaigns, they argue.

Those methods -- from anesthetic cream applied to the skin to simply giving babies sugar water -- are seldom employed now, the panel says in the journal Clinical Therapeutics. ...more