In the early 1980s, when Kanwaljeet Anand was a medical resident working with prematurely born infants, he noticed that little babies who went to the operating room for surgery came back in much worse condition, showing all the signs of severe stress.  He investigated, and discovered that the babies were not being anesthetized.  This was the norm.  Doctors believed that infants had mostly undeveloped nervous systems, and so did not give them painkillers when operating.  But if they didn’t feel pain, the young Dr. Anand wondered, why did they come back from surgery in such poor condition?

As NICU technology improved, the preterm infants he cared for grew younger and younger - with gestational ages of 24 weeks, 23, 22 - and he noticed that even the most premature babies grimaced when pricked by a needle. “So I said to myself, Could it be that this pain system is developed and functional before the baby is born?” he told me in the fall.

As you can imagine, this question touches on abortion. 

Over the past four years, anti-abortion groups have turned fetal pain into a new front in their battle to restrict or ban abortion. Anti-abortion politicians have drafted laws requiring doctors to tell patients seeking abortions that a fetus can feel pain and to offer the fetus anesthesia; such legislation has already passed in five states. Anand says he does not oppose abortion in all circumstances but says decisions should be made on a case-by-case basis. Nonetheless, much of the activists’ and lawmakers’ most powerful rhetoric on fetal pain is borrowed from Anand himself.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see doctors giving anesthesia to fetuses to kill the pain, and then aborting them.  Nuts.

Doug Glanville played for the Chicago Cubs, Philadelphia Phillies and Texas Rangers from the mid 1990s to 2004.  He writes an op-ed for the Times, and it’s a refreshingly authentic and personal and fresh angle on the temptation to take steroids:

Human nature wants to put the brakes on that rate of change. While your clock is ticking, faster, stronger and younger players are setting up their lockers next to yours. They usually have better sound bites and lower salaries, too. In 1998, I was the new kid in Philadelphia, battling Lenny Dysktra for the center field job. Five years later, I was mentoring another new kid, Marlon Byrd, so he could replace me. Faced with that rate of career atrophy, players are capable of rash, self-serving and often irresponsible decisions. Enter steroids.

The best thing I’ve read on it so far.

We are a nation of consumers and buyers and hoarders.  We buy houses as much for the size of the closets as for the size of the kitchen.  We rent homes with big attics.  We rent storage units.  We build sheds.  We spend our money on storage bins and vacuum-sealed zip-loc bags for sweaters and old dresses.  We own more than we can use, and we are afraid to let it go.  Some say this is just a symptom of the fantastic abundance of the American economy.  Others call it a disease.  No, really.  A disease.  Dr. David F. Tolin of the Institute of Living and adjunct professor at Yale University says if you have more storage space than living space, you have to look in the mirror:

“It isn’t a house problem,” he [said]. “It’s a person problem. The person needs to fundamentally change their behavior.” […] At its most extreme, chronic disorganization is called hoarding, a condition many experts believe is a mental illness in its own right, although psychiatrists have yet to formally recognize it.

If you need to “gauge the seriousness” of your clutter problem, then visit the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization.  But of course, you can also visit Goodwill or St. Vincent de Paul.  If they won’t take it, then at least do this.

This is one of the best, and shortest, pieces I’ve come across at Slate.  It’s about a man and his dog, and how they volunteer with hospice care.  The man rescued his dog, and now, it seems, his dog (”Izzy”) rescues people.  This story is not sentimental, but it is full of sentiment.

He approaches people in pain, people in comas, with dementia and paralysis, disfigured and frightened, always softly, carefully, and lovingly. He threads his way around IVs and oxygen tanks. I’ve never had a dog that could do this kind of work, nor could I begin to imagine how to train a dog to do it.

Read it here.

The official MLB steroids report is in. Here’s the list of baseballers linked to steroid use. See if your faves are on it:

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Cato Unbound’s monthly debate is up and running.  This month, as if to remind us why so many Christmas songs are in a minor key, the debate is all about death:

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What’s wrong with blushing?  A lot, if you’re this woman.  Sorry, no photos - she’s just a chronic blusher, writing about her problem.

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Have you ever been really sad?  Were you confused about whether or not you were just sad or actually, clinically depressed?  Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute reviews a book that feels your pain: The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield.

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Many of you know the name Mehmet Oz, or Dr. Oz, who’s made his name as the frank house physician in the Temple of Oprah.  For Esquire, he writes about how much irreversible damage might be done to your body, no matter how healthy you’ve become.  His standard for measurement is the life of Keith Richards.  Just follow the white rabbit and you’ll understand. 

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Thanksgiving sometimes gets a little too oversentimentalized for me.  I love it, and I love being sentimental, but I sometimes like to insist on leavening the fluff with a little warm reality.  So, while we’re talking about being thankful, let’s also consider what seems to be the counterpoint to thankfulness, which is to say, denial.  The Times says we’re all in denial.  About something. 

[J]ust try denying it and watch friends make a list. For Freud, denial was a defense against external realities that threaten the ego, and many psychologists today would argue that it can be a protective defense in the face of unbearable news, like a cancer diagnosis.

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