Mom of Sick Connecticut Teen 'Collapses' in Court After Judge Sends Kid to Foster Care

[magical thyme]

47. the simple fact that they totally excluded the initial diagnosing doctors from consultation tells me

this is a travesty of justice.

The fact that they didn't include their own gastroenterologist from the start strikes me as very odd indeed. The parents came to Children's specifically to see the gastroenterologist, and the hospital instead barred him from seeing her. A young hotshot ER doctor with 7 whole months experience who had yet to complete his specialty in neurology decided it wasn't mitchondrial disease based on what? His lack of expertise in metabolic disorders? His lack of experience in general?

Even if they questioned the diagnosis, where she presented with and her history included gastroenterological signs and symptoms, I would have expected them to have at least included the original gastroenterologist in any examinations and consultations. They might have another gastroenterologist in their staff also examine as well, since it is quite normal to get a second opinion from within your own staff, but I certainly would not expect that an original diagnosis and treatment would be thrown out based on the opinion of a young, inexperienced ED doctor and a young psychiatrist.

And I would have expected them to contact her regular doctor, if only to confirm what testing had and had not been done, what the results were, what had he seen that had led to his diagnosis and treatment plan. You might then question what was done, and disagree with it, but you don't accuse the parents of medical abuse when they were working with a leading doctor and following his prescriptions and recommendations.

I can tell you right now where I work when we have a patient present with extreme symptoms, say critical-level lab results, we seek out their primary physician, we don't just wing it.

It is one thing for an ED doctor to raise questions. It is quite another thing for a hospital to act in the manner Children's has, not only on the initial night in question, but their subsequent behavior, refusing to work with her prior doctors.

That simply is not normal practice, in my experience. At the small rural hospital where I work, we often have very sick patients that we end up shipping out to larger, specialty hospitals. I have never heard of them excluding information we have on testing and treatment we have provided. Quite the opposite -- if we don't transmit our data fast enough for them, they call looking for it.

The parents they accused of "subjecting to unecessary medical treatments" were acting on the advice and prescriptions of the doctors who originally diagnosed her. They could not "subject her" to invasive surgeries. And since when do insurance companies go around paying for expensive and unecessary surgeries performed because the parents demanded them?

Her parents didn't demand those treatments. Their "doctor shopping" consisted of looking for a doctor that was able to come up with a diagnosis and treatment plan that worked. That is a very common experience when people suffer from rare diseases that aren't recognized by a lot of doctors, least of all inexperienced doctors.

Imo, their refusal to even consult with her 2 physicians of 2 years, and their suspect diagnosis of mental illness based on excluding obvious physical causes after 3 days constitutes medical malpractice, and everything they have done since then has been with the intent of protecting themselves.

As with some recent political episodes, as this gains more publicity, I won't be surprised to see former victims coming out of the woodwork with their own stories. I have already seen some interesting things.