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

[pnwmom]

139. So you're dismissing everything that Dr. Korson said about being cut out of the team

of doctors caring for her? You think the Harvard psychiatrists should have been entitled to do that within a day of her arriving in the ER? Without speaking to or getting any input from Dr. Korson, the metabolic specialist who'd been treating her for years?

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

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.”

SNIP

But the meeting turned out to be far from the wide-ranging summit involving all the key players that Korson had been requesting. Besides him, there were only two people in the Bader conference room: the unit’s psychiatrist, Dr. Colleen Ryan, and a social worker. Korson was not invited to see Justina or discuss the fundamental medical disagreement with any of the doctors who had disputed his working diagnosis for her.

SNIP

However, the affidavit failed to mention that the social worker had interviewed Korson, and that Korson had explained the origins of the working diagnosis of mitochondrial disease that he had given Justina. Internal state records show that Korson had explained that the disorder sometimes runs in families and that he had also been treating Justina’s older sister for it.

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


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.

Korson has insisted the best way to handle these standoffs was a face-to-face roundtable meeting that included all the child’s key physicians, teachers, and providers — the people who knew her best — with hopes of achieving a unified plan to present to the parents.