One of the world's major clinical journals, the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, published an astonishing study claiming that a mother's kisses do not reduce a child's pain. That goes against everything mothers do to comfort their children.
The study involved 943 children, who were exposed to two kinds of pain. In the first, a sweet was placed under a table so that the child would crawl to it and, on picking it up, inevitably bump their head on the table. In the second, a heat source was placed between the child and their favourite toy, so that reaching for the toy hurt. In both cases the pain was not trivial, but not severe either. The children were divided into three groups: the first was kissed by their mother, the second by another woman, and the third got no comfort at all.
Pain was measured after one minute and after five minutes. The result: children kissed by their mother felt the same pain as those kissed by a stranger, and children who were not kissed at all felt less pain than the others.
The volunteers were recruited from Canadian children's clinics. Mothers gave written consent, and a child's smile was taken as the child's consent.
In conclusion, the scientists advised mothers not to kiss their babies to soothe them when they are in pain.
If you thought all this was mad and unethical, you were right. The article was a satire of the child behaviour studies that get published. The journal made up the experiment to draw the world's attention to how unethical much research is. But it never said in so many words that the piece was satire, so many websites copied the results and discussed them as if they were real.
A fine example of how a little knowledge can be more dangerous than ignorance.
Like
Love
Angry
Dislike
