Medical Child Abuse, An Overview - Part 2

This post originally appeared at The Scientific Parent blog on 4/13/16.

Medical child abuse can be thought of as the flip side of medical neglect; instead of failing to get real medical treatment a child needs, a child’s caregiver seeks out medical treatment that the child does not need, and which may in fact be harmful. While I addressed that in depth in my last post, today, I discuss the complications to this discovery process. What about rare diseases? How can physicians tell the difference? In this post, I address rare diseases, regulations, and mandated reporting issues.

Medical Child Abuse, An Overview - Part 1

This post originally appeared at The Scientific Parent blog on 4/12/16.

Recently, I wrote about the case of Justina Pelletier, whose parents are suing Boston Children's Hospital for negligence after the hospital rejected Justina's diagnosis of mitochondrial disorder in favor of somatoform disorder. The hospital staff further suspected medical child abuse, which they reported to Massachusetts Department of Children and Families. I won't go into the details of Justina's case. If you're interested, you can read my original post on the subject, my follow-up post, or my post on the dubious legislation that her case spawned.

Instead, I want to focus on medical child abuse here - what it is, and the difficulties and nuances involved with it. Many parents or other caregivers, and even many health care providers, may not know much about what constitutes medical child abuse. This article will, hopefully, serve as a general introduction and jumping off point for further discussion.

Wakefield's "Vaxxed" Demands Less Safety

"This is not an anti-vaccine movie. We're just going to use ominous imagery to make people scared of vaccines."
- Del Bigtree, Vaxxed Producer [My paraphrase.]

This past weekend, Andrew Wakefield's factitious documentary Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe premiered in New York City at the Angelika Film Center, after being dropped from the TriBeCa Film Festival. A number of reporters and skeptics attended the film, live-tweeting the experience and writing up reviews of the movie afterward. You can read reviews at The Hollywood Reporter, STAT News, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Indiewire, and others. The central story of the film, such as it is, is William Thompson and the CDC. For background on the saga, please read this reference guide. (As an aside, even though the impetus behind the film is William Thompson, the CDC researcher does not appear anywhere in the film. Instead, the audience is left with only recorded phone calls between Thompson and Brian Hooker. The transcripts were released last year in a book, which was discussed here, here, and here.) The movie alleges that the CDC covered up evidence that vaccines cause autism. However, according to William Thompson's own documents, which Matt Carey has kindly made publicly available at his blog Left Brain Right Brain, there was no cover up.

I have yet to see the film, so I will leave you to read those other reviews. Instead, I wanted to focus on a list of "demands" at the end of the film, helpfully posted by a Wakefield supporter on Twitter. The four demands would do little to help children or people with autism and would instead run counter to what the anti-vaccine community wants.