Surgery can make anyone anxious, but it is especially hard for young children. Kids going into surgery may be separated from their parents for the first time in a frightening new environment, and they may not understand what's happening.
"For many families and kids, this is one of the most stressful events in their entire lives," said Dr. Sam Rodriguez, an anesthesiologist at the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford in Palo Alto, Calif.
Panicking before surgery can cause both physical and emotional problems. If children are crying, for example, they're sucking air into their stomachs, which increases the risk that they'll aspirate saliva into their lungs. Anxiety before surgery can also cause long-term psychological distress and behavioral issues in kids, and it's been associated with a more painful recovery.
Many children are given an anti-anxiety medication before general anesthesia. But that carries risks.
"Anytime we can decrease exposure to a medication, especially in a young child who has a developing brain, it's preferential to use some of these non-medication techniques," said Rodriguez. He wanted to come up with a safer, cheaper and more entertaining alternative.
So Rodriguez and his co-worker Dr. Thomas Caruso began tinkering with various pieces of technology.
Eventually, they came up with final product: a video unit they could mount on any hospital bed that projects an image onto a large screen hooked onto the bed right in front of the patient's eyes.
They called it BERT, short for Bedside Entertainment Theater, and it costs about $900 to build.
