Three-armed baby amputated

[asterroc]

In follow-up to this story, doctors chopped off one of the baby's arms. So now we have a normal-looking person with a dysfunctional left arm. Absolutely wonderful.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

both left arms were dysfunctional. don't you think it would be easier for him having one bad arm than three arms? i mean he'd be more accepted by society, don't you think?

[l0stmyrel1g10n.livejournal.com]

oops, that was me. forgot to log in.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I feel like it's a choice the individual should make, not that someone should make it for him. Is it better to look "normal" and have a dysfunctional arm, or to look "weird" and have two arms that together might function "normally"? I don't know, and I don't think it's right for me - or the doctors - to choose. There was nothing in the articles I've read that say that the additional arm was harmful to the baby's health, and it appears it was just done to fit a societal norm.

Compare it to if a child is born intersexed - for example a genetic boy with micropenis, or genetic girl with clitoromegaly. In either case, traditionally the doctors would remove the offending sex organ and assign the baby a gender of "girl." Is it appropriate for doctors and parents to randomly assign a gender to the baby and cut and stitch together his/her genitals until they look the way they're supposed to for that gender?

(Of course it's not a perfect analogy - "correcting" limbs is more visible, while external sex organs I suspect affect personal identity more during puberty.)

[sammka.livejournal.com]

I think this is noticeably different from intersexuality. For one, surgical operations on intersexed children make those kids go straight from having a funny-looking, yet functional, set of genitalia to a normal-looking but totally dysfunctional set of genitalia. Whereas this operation is not interfering with the functionality of the other left arm.

Second, there are probably serious other reasons to amputate one of those two left arms. For one, neither one is likely to work well. I'm not sure if any controlled studies have been done, but I'd guess that that kid would have to control both left arms with the same brain function that we usually get to control just one arm. This means that his brain will be working overtime to figure out this other arm and he is less likely to gain serious functionality with either one of his left arms.

More importantly, the heart would have to supply blood through an entire extra limb, which is not something our bodies are prepared to do. Apparently this has happened in similar phenomena that were not corrected.

And finally, if you wait until the kid is old enough to decide, all those brain wirings will be fixed. The kid would respond to the loss of one of those left arms in the same way a normal amputee does - most likely with tons of phantom pain. An amputation now would be done while the brain is still incredibly plastic and adaptable, which means, essentially, that the kid won't miss that arm.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I agree with your first and third points, but I am uncertain about the second (as you appear to be too), and disagree with the fourth. That last argument seems to imply that babies feel less pain than adults, and that physical trauma is less harmful to babies than adults. It seems highly likely that the baby will experience things as poorly as an adult, but is unable to express it or remember it. While the baby may be more adaptable, I do not agree that the arm won't be missed.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

It has nothing to do with feeling as much pain as an adult or remembering things, but rather to the structure of the brain itself. There is TONS of literature about adult amputees feeling phantom pain for years, or for their entire lives, after the amputation of the limb. That is because their brains are hard-wired to believe that the limb is there, and cannot be re-wired anymore.

Babies, on the other hand, have incredibly plastic brains. Which means that after the initial pain and healing process of the surgery, the baby will not be left with a whole section of his brain that is devoted to controlling that arm and that is constantly alarmed when it doesn't receive neural signals from the arm. The brain will simply rewire itself as if that third arm was never there.

There are tons of examples of things that can be done to babies and not to adults because of brain plasticity differences. For instance, in some cases, half of the entire brain of a baby has been removed for medical reasons, and the child has developed relatively normally. You cannot remove half an adult's brain and expect that adult to ever function normally. Also, scientists have found that 'swapping' the visual nerves and auditory nerves of baby ferrets has resulted in the baby ferrets that saw and heard just as well as any other ferret. Adult ferrets would be simply confused and unable to adapt.