Susan Burton

Like, how are they examining this?

Well, so they're starting to do studies.

And that was actually one of the things I was really interested in doing in my reporting is kind of making a timeline of this, following it through the medical literature.

For years, there wasn't much about this in the medical literature at all.

It seemed like the story of that research really began in 2016 when a patient actually published her account of a painful cesarean in which she felt everything.

And from there, you can kind of track increasing interest over time.

For example, there was an editorial published in 2021 that has this title that I think is really telling.

Are we finally tackling the problem of pain during cesarean section?

You know, so it sort of gets at this question.

hush-hush quality of this thing, kind of unspoken, and now are we finally paying attention to it.

But just recently, just last month, there was a really important study released.

It was published in the journal Anesthesiology, and it tries to measure how often patients are feeling pain during C-sections.

So there have been efforts, but they've been smaller scale efforts.

They've been efforts to measure it within one institution, for example.

And they have most often been efforts that rely on doctors' assessments of patient pain.

So this study is important because it was a big study.

It was at 15 hospitals in the U.S.

and Canada.

It enrolled almost 4,000 patients, and it asked patients whether they were in pain during C-section.

Which seems pretty crucial to understanding if women are feeling pain, to ask them directly.