In early March, Judge Johnson put Justina Pelletier's medical care back with Dr. Korman/Tufts

[pnwmom]

135. Both parts? If so, I don't understand how you could have made so many of the claims you've made.

Or are you impugning the accuracy of the Globe's reporting?

What seems undeniable to me is that Korson, the metabolic specialist at Tufts, and the psychiatrists at Children's, had a difference of opinion about what kind of treatment Justina needed. And the state intervened on the side of the Harvard psychiatrists -- until a few weeks ago when the judge ruled that she should have a new team led by Korson.

I don't understand how anyone can justify, when there is a choice between two reputable hospitals and medical teams, taking the decision out of the parents' hands and handing it to the state. If Korson is right, she should have been sent to Tufts within days of entering Children's. Why was the opinion of the doctor who had treated these sisters for years completely discounted?


For example:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/12/16/month-medical-ordeal-conclusion-still-uncertain/Y7qvYTGsq8QklkxUZvuUgP/story.html

Staring at his desktop computer, surrounded by a sea of paperwork and multiple coffee mugs personalized with photos of his young son, Korson started to type. The 55-year-old doctor was getting daily calls from Justina’s parents, Linda and Lou Pelletier of West Hartford, Conn., each one more frantic than the last. Yet he felt he had no answers for them. “I am growing increasingly uncomfortable with the process at Children’s Hospital to evaluate Justina,” he wrote to the girl’s court-appointed attorney.

Korson stressed that there were no empirical tests to support the hospital’s new psychiatric diagnosis for Justina of somatoform disorder, which describes a patient with symptoms that are real but for which no physical or biological explanation can be found. “It is a clinical hunch,” he wrote, “a best guess.”

SNIP

In July, Justina Pelletier’s family was rattled by a phone call from the state child protection agency saying it was ready to release the 14-year-old from Boston Children’s Hospital — but not into her parents’ custody.

Nonetheless, to advance this new diagnosis suggesting a powerful psychological component to Justina’s weakness, eating problems, and chronic constipation, “the team has demanded that Justina be removed from the home and severe restrictions imposed on contact with her parents. This represents the most severe and intrusive intervention a patient can undergo.”

“So now I am writing,” Korson told the lawyer, “because it feels like Justina’s treatment team is out to prove the diagnosis at all costs.”

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/12/15/justina/vnwzbbNdiodSD7WDTh6xZI/story.html

As tensions with Justina’s parents were rising, Newton reached out to Korson at Tufts, though not for his views on Justina’s medical care. Her call was primarily to tell Korson that Children’s had begun investigating the Pelletiers for possible medical child abuse. The only other contact with Korson had come Monday, when a Children’s neurology resident called him for a quick summary of his treatment of Justina.

SNIP


Although he had given Justina a “working” diagnosis of mito, he acknowledged he couldn’t be 100 percent sure. But he was certain of this much: Justina had chronic, serious symptoms that left her drained and were suggestive of mito, particularly her pattern of losing stamina as the day and week wore on, which her teachers had noted. Her older sister’s muscle biopsy had also suggested mito, which can run in families. And Justina had received the rare cecostomy surgery only after a sensitive, two-hour-long test measuring how effectively her colon pushed out waste had provided objective evidence that her colon was seriously impaired.

Justina also did not seem to him to be a child suffering from a psychosomatic disorder, since many with that condition tend to avoid school. In contrast, Justina loved school and her friends so much that she resisted Korson’s recommendation for her to reduce her fatigue by switching to a mornings-only schedule.

Korson knew that Justina’s parents could be difficult. But he also understood that parents of youngsters with mito are often extremely stressed, carrying the burden of caring for a chronically ill child whose illness very few people understand.

He recognized that occasionally abuse accusations against mito parents do turn out to be valid, but in his experience those have been relatively rare. Of the more than 40 mito cases where suspicions were raised about a parent of one of his patients, he supported the accusation in three cases.

SNIP