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Another Medical Kidnapping

Messages
15,786
I have to wonder thou if there are conditions like that, whether these are really for her best interest at all? (we all know that those who have ME/CFS sometimes miss school and I doubt speach therapy would help one of us.. so does it really help mitochondrial issues if she's exhausted and slurring speech?).
Those conditions only applied while the parents didn't have legal custody. Now that they have full custody returned to them, they can do whatever the hell they (and their real doctors) want :)
 
Messages
15,786
It was the hospital thou who reported this case to DCF and also would of spoke to that judge causing the decision which got made to be made. The hospital in a way is just as much to blame as the judge who isnt even a medical person and needs to base decisions on whatever he's been told by the medical people.
Yes, but additionally the DCF and the judiciary have to rely on medical experts. The hospital made claims based on their own completely unsubstantiated beliefs, and almost certainly oversold those beliefs as medical fact. The hospital is also the one who got the other parties involved, and was the driving factor behind Justina's incarceration.

I'd think the hospital is by far the most culpable party, and probably the most vulnerable to a lawsuit as well.
 

IreneF

Senior Member
Messages
1,552
Location
San Francisco
Because Justina's case involved the judicial system, she may have had an attorney assigned to her, even though this was family court. If so, I wonder what that individual did.

I must say I didn't much care for her parents but I sympathized with them.
 

Little Bluestem

All Good Things Must Come to an End
Messages
4,930
I am behind on reading the forum and just now saw this. What great news! 16 month is a long time in the life of a teenager. So much will have gone on in the life of Justina's friends that it will be difficult for her to 'catch up' with them. I suppose she will be a year behind in school now. I hope she is recovered enough to attend school in the fall.
 

Iquitos

Senior Member
Messages
513
Location
Colorado
Reminds me of the cases where a doctor had a woman arrested and handcuffed to a hospital bed for the duration of her pregnancy because she didn't follow his advice to stop smoking and stop having sex with her husband. And another where a doctor wanted to do a C-section on a woman who had had 4-5 babies already and knew her own pattern in labor. By the time the doctor got a judge to authorize her forced surgery, she had already given birth.

These doctors who think they are God, and the judges who enforce that attitude, how very, very scary.
 

taniaaust1

Senior Member
Messages
13,054
Location
Sth Australia
Justina’s hospitalization is the most extreme of a handful of unusually contentious cases over the last 18 months involving Children’s Hospital and the Department of Children and Families. A Globe review of these and other cases nationally has found that most involve a disputed medical diagnosis, charges of parental misconduct filed or threatened by the hospital, and the inability of the state child-welfare agency to provide effective intervention.
At issue in these cases is also the use of a controversial term, medical child abuse, that can be leveled against any parent who is perceived to be acting against the best interests of his or her child in a medical setting. Child protection specialists stress how much children can suffer at the hands of parents intent on “over-medicalizing” or interfering with their care. But parents, including the Pelletiers, contend they were hit with these charges simply because they disagreed with the hospital’s diagnosis and wanted to take their child elsewhere for treatment.
The problem is that there are few good paths to resolution once doctors are convinced that parents are harming their child. The tools available are exceedingly blunt and emotionally inflammatory: The system basically requires doctors to suggest the parents are unfit and may deserve to temporarily lose custody of the child, as well as any voice in the child’s treatment.

The Department of Children and Families is supposed to referee such disputes, but the agency is ill-equipped to intercede at the highest levels of medicine. Across the entire state, the DCF staffers with formal medical training consist of just one half-time pediatrician, one half-time psychiatrist, and a handful of nurses. Five years after the Legislature approved funding for a physician medical director, the agency has yet to fill the slot.

Instead, the agency regularly turns to doctors in the medical mecca of Boston for free consults. Its deputy commissioner acknowledges that, given Children’s standing as one of the world’s top pediatric hospitals, the state often looks there first for assistance — which can create at least the appearance of a conflict of interest when the agency is weighing abuse allegations brought by the hospital.

“The medical capacity of DCF is nil,” said Dr. Stephen Boos, the medical director for the team that handles child protection cases at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield. Yet he stressed that cases of mitochondrial disease — the diagnosis at the center of the standoff over Justina — are some of the thorniest in medicine. No doctor wants to miss diagnosing this relatively new but still murky cellular energy-production disorder because it can be fatal. But mistakenly diagnosing it can send a child down the road of needless and potentially harmful procedures and medication. As a result, Boos said, there are “lots of value judgments,” and in Boston, “with these super-subspecialists, these egos are going to be high.”
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/12/15/justina/vnwzbbNdiodSD7WDTh6xZI/story.html

The article was interesting, it talked about how there has been 5 of these causes at just that hospital in a 12 mth period. One was another mito case, two were PANDAS cases.
 

chipmunk1

Senior Member
Messages
765
the psychologist responsible for this got a NIH grant to research somatisation disorders. The day before justina was kidnapped another child that had been kidnapped and held for 6 months (for having a somatisation disorder) got released from Children's. Again the same psychologist was involved in that case.

The NIH sponsored research ended in April. Justina got released in June.

draw your own conclusions.

The hospital’s clinical investigations policy continues (emphasis added):

Children who are Wards of the state may be included in research that presents greater than minimal risk with no prospect of direct benefit (46.406 (50.53) or 46.407 ( 50.54) only if the [institutional review board] determines and documents that such research is
 
Messages
19
Location
Illinois USA
Reminds me of the cases where a doctor had a woman arrested and handcuffed to a hospital bed for the duration of her pregnancy because she didn't follow his advice to stop smoking and stop having sex with her husband. And another where a doctor wanted to do a C-section on a woman who had had 4-5 babies already and knew her own pattern in labor. By the time the doctor got a judge to authorize her forced surgery, she had already given birth.
:jaw-drop: