Amnesia...?
So anyway, little thought for the week. A hypothetical situation to consider…
I am given a drug - a perfect amnesiac, producing 100% amnesia, but no analgesia, muscle relaxation, loss of consciousness etc. This drug is administered for 1 hour, and lasts for only 1 hour, by which time it wears off instantly. During this one hour period, I am exposed to a painful stimulus, say a capsaicin infusion that lasts only 10 minutes, before wearing off with no lasting pain.
During this 10 minute period, I can of course feel the painful stimulus, I have not been given any analgesia. However, as far as I would be aware, I would also have “woken up” one hour after the analgesic was administered. Extreme cases of amnesia result in people believing they have woken up for the first time regularly, as they have no memory of anything that has happened in the past. So, if I was effectively “asleep”, though 100% conscious during that time, and presumably able to scream at the pain, if I feel, after 1 hour that I was asleep the entire time, did I actually “feel” the pain - was my welfare compromised?
It’s a really interesting question I think!
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1 comment:
It is an interesting question, and I think the answer is dependent on whether one chooses to measure the welfare of an individual as something ongoing, over its lifetime, or at discrete moments in time.
In the 10 minutes of screaming agony, the individual feels pain - welfare is compromised. Generally I believe you can say the same of the distress caused during loading and transport for slaughter - welfare is compromised for this last day of the animal's life.
Viewing the welfare as an ongoing thing, though: since your amnesiac effectively restores welfare to its previous (hopefully) good level, the lack of lasting effects makes it into such a blip on the scale that it could effectively be ignored (the equivalent for the slaughtered piggies above would be them having an excellent quality of life all of the time up to the point of slaughter).
It's all a bit tree-falling-in-the-woods, really, but one reason I'd genuinely consider it an insult to the individual's welfare is the fact that the experience of severe pain DOES have effects on the body beyond the pain itself, effects which could possibly affect health and therefore welfare for some days (or more?) afterwards.
So is there a welfare issue? Possibly. The memory of the pain is gone, and in many cases that's what would cause the most lasting hurt to a human patient.
One other consideration: is it ethical? In my view, no. Despite the existence of effective analgesics, the experimenter chose to allow this pain. It was real and present for that period, and possibly caused damage beyond the memory of such pain. Whether or not anyone was around to hear, the tree is down and it's staying that way.
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