TV found to be a painkiller for children – Yahoo! News:

Sometimes the numbing effect of TV can be helpful. Especially if you’re a kid being stuck with a needle at the hospital. Researchers confirmed the distracting power of television — something parents have long known — when they found that children watching cartoons suffered less pain from a hypodermic needle than kids not watching TV.

Especially disturbing to the author of the scientific study was that the cartoons were even more comforting than Mom.

While it’s good to have a powerful distraction for children getting painful medical procedures, it is also troubling “because we have demonstrated the excessive power of television,” said chief author, Carlo Bellieni, a father of three and a neonatologist and pediatrician at the University of Siena in Italy.

Its not just kids. After my surgery last August, I found that watching TV help distract from the pain. Maybe not as effectively as the morphine, but somewhat close. The morphine could run out and TV would keep me distracted for another 1/2 before I’d notice unless there was nother distraction.