New Techniques Of Combating Pain

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30291, 18 November 1963, Page 14

New Techniques Of Combating Pain

New techniques of combating chronic pain will be introduced to the Christchurch hospitals’ post - graduate course in anaesthesia this week by Dr. J. M. Hansen, associate professor of anaesthesiology at the University of Washington. Dr. Hansen is making his first visit to Christchurch since he left in 1955 on a Fulbright scholardtip to the University of Kansas. At the end of his scholarship term he was invited to stay on art the university, and joined the new department of anaesthesiology at Washington in 1961. The department has a staff of 70, as well as 28 doctors in clinical training and six others training on research. It serves seven Seattle hospitals, including a teaching hospital as big as the Dunedin medical school.

The main research programme in the Washington department was to find a more acceptable method of treating chronic pain in persons suffering from advanced cancer or other incurable diseases. Dr. Hansen said yesterday. This problem had been rather neglected, with the result that incurable patients could be left incapacitated by morphine or other drugs until they died. Techniques developed in Washington made it possible for the source of pain to be isolated. for instance, by the local use of alcohol or phenol. This meant that sufferers could lead quite useful lives without feeling a burden to

relatives or society, and die with some dignity instead of having to linger under sedation.

“We anaesthetists are the people who should do this work, and I hope that we can stimulate people in New Zealand to set up clinics to do the same thing,” said Dr. Hansen. Since the work at the University of Washington became widely known, desperate requests for help had been received from all over the world. This showed the unlimited application for such research. The second main research programme was one on hyaline membrane disease of the lung in new-born infants, said Dr. Hansen, This research into surface tension m the lung was to be done under a sm-dollar grant. The disease was one winch caused many of the deaths in the first few days of an infant’s life, and claimed the life of President Kennedy’s child this year, he said. He was grateful for the opportunity to return to Christchurch and share the knowledge which his study overseas had given him, Dr. Hansen said. "The main things we notice on returning to New Zealand are the beautiful farms, and the teen-age children,’ said Dr. Hansen. “These young people have poise and self-confidence, and will have less of a battle to succeed than my own generation had. They also lack the brashness of their American counterparts. “Although we have three grown-up children of our own, we had become rather disenchanted with children generally, and we are all the more pleased to see this healthy state of affairs in New Zealand. It is undoubtedly the best place in the world in which to bring up children, although America is undoubtedly the most stimulating place in the world to work.”