Parents who took child out of hospital arrested

debsey

Mon, Sep 01 2014, 11:13 am

OPINIONATED wrote:

The father read about proton Beam therapy on the Internet, and the boy's oncologist said it wouldn't help this type of cancer.

This is my opinion: I have no knowledge of the specific cancer the boy had and whether or not proton beam therapy would help. I cannot comment.

Opinionated - how NON-opinionated of you........ Peace sign

seeker

Mon, Sep 01 2014, 12:45 pm

It's not about whether this therapy would help or not; it's about whether the doctors have the right to override the parents in determining the best care for the child. If there was something clearly dangerous about the proposed alternative treatment and the parents were doing it anyway, I could see room to intervene.

the world's best mom

Mon, Sep 01 2014, 3:22 pm

It seems to me like this situation arose from a communication problem. The parents were questioning the plans for their son's treatment to the extent that the doctors finally said that if they ask anymore, they will get a restraining order against the parents. It seems like the parents must have been very insistent and the doctors felt they were getting in the way. That's what made the parents pull him out of the hospital and flee.

The parents may have been at fault, or the doctor's may have been at fault. I don't know who was the one acting more unreasonably there.

However, by taking their son out of the hospital in his condition, the parents ARE putting him at risk. As much as the father says he is getting all the nutrition he needs, that kid is very sick and needs proper care. Problems arise often in situations like his, and parents do not know the best way to handle medical crises.

The parents and the doctors needed to sit down and have a calm, logical discussion about the plans for treatment before acting. Instead they were angry and threatening on both sides. now the poor child is suffering without his parents there to comfort him. I think this situation was handled incorrectly by both the parents and the doctor. If the doctor couldn't work with them, they could have switched doctors instead of fleeing with the sick child. If the parents were being rational, surely they could have found a doctor who was willing to work with them.

LittleDucky

Mon, Sep 01 2014, 4:18 pm

A parent has a right to switch doctors if they don't like the doctor's plan. It's one thing if the parents refuse to get their kid medical care at all. But if they are seeing a licensed professional.... Who is to say x chemo is better than y? If science backed research holds them both up? There was a case in Boston recentlywhere a kid went to the hospital, the doctors took the kid away from her parents, didn't allow any unmonitored communication, forced treatment on her that didn't fit her rare diagnosis (given at a different well-known hospital), decided the kid has a psychiatric illness (partly because she didn't believe what her parents were "doing to her"). Rolling Eyes

Crazy world where parents can't decide medical care for their kids.

November

Mon, Sep 01 2014, 4:32 pm

LittleDucky wrote:

Crazy world where parents can't decide medical care for their kids.

There are times, however, when you need to submit to the authority to whom you sought and "contracted" with for treatment. In this case, this child has x brain tumor. It is life-threatening. The parents brought the child to the hospital for treatment. They contracted a Dr who explained the protocol and the parents sign on it. You don't go to the hospital and tell the Dr what protocol you want. They operated on the child and removed the tumor. To be certain that they kill all of the cancer cells, they prescribe chemotherapy. Parent refused chemotherapy - you have an ethical dilemma for the Dr and the hospital staff who have already begun a path of treatment and would be maltreating the child if they did not complete the protocol. That is really not a simple matter of parental involvement. Who will now take responsibility if the treatment protocol is modified by the parents and things do not go well for the child, chas veshalom? If the Drs disagreed with the parents preferred treatment and went along with it anyway, they can still be held responsible.

Frumdoc

Mon, Sep 01 2014, 7:35 pm

I understand the reasons for the police being involved was that the parents effectively "kidnapped" their child without any known means to feed him his essential nutrition or drugs, including lifesaving steriods or anti epileptic meds, in the very early days following brain surgery, the lack of which could cause the child to die very quickly from a prolonged seizure or raised intracranial pressure, and also without communicating to the hospital that they were taking him other than for the brief home visit which had been arranged.

If they had gone about it in a more organized and planned fashion, the response would likely have been very different, although it would depend on the individual circumstances. The laws of child protection include the means to protect children from their parents if necessary, sadly this can be the case, although it is not clear what it was here, and we will likely never find out, as the hospital and police are obliged to keep the details secret to protect the confidentiality of the child, even though the family can say what they want.

A clearer cut example is that of a child requiring emergency lifesaving surgery, eg, for a ruptured appendix, but the parents refuse to consent for whatever reason, a child can be made an emergency ward of court forvthe duration of treatment to enable his life to be saved. The law regarding the power a parent has over their child is complex and different across the world.

It must be terrible for all of them to be going through this, and I hope there is a good outcome for this poor child.

FranticFrummie

Mon, Sep 01 2014, 8:35 pm

Read about Justina Pelletier. She was held in custody of a Boston hospital for 16 months, and her parents weren't even allowed to see her except for one hour a week, with a social worker present. A really tragic case. She walked into ER with a flu, and left a year and a half later in a wheelchair. The "treatment" nearly killed her.

https://www.google.com/search?.....d=ssl

It's every parent's nightmare.

Jeanette

Tue, Sep 02 2014, 9:34 am

The more I read of this case the worse it gets.
The parents are now being held in a maximum security prison in Spain with murderers and terrorists. For what?
They didn't give the child a brain tumor.
We also don't know exactly what kind of brain tumor the child has, what his prognosis is or treatment options.
Let's say the child is dying.
So what is the worst case scenario? He'll die a little sooner?
But let's say there is hope for him to survive. Let's say the doctors have given them treatment options that they rejected. What were the chances for success? What were the chances for long-term suffering or disabilities as a result of the treatment? If it's clear cut, like 90% success rate with low risk for side effects, then we'd probably all side with the hospital. But when the picture is fuzzier than that, with low risk of success and high risk of side effects, there is room for parents to say, I don't like the risks associated with this option and I don't agree to the treatment.

yogabird

Tue, Sep 02 2014, 10:35 am

I agree with the poster who said we're being given way too little information.

I disagree with the poster who said they need to submit to authority. There is no such thing as signing consent for an entire course of treatment. They should be allowed to opt out at any point given their son's life is not in immediate danger.

Why was the hospital not allowing them to go for a second opinion?

Frumdoc

Tue, Sep 02 2014, 12:52 pm

From what I understand, the spanish police have massively overreacted to an alert put out, which is in the process of being legally withdrawn. It was an issue when the boy was removed in an unsafe way, but seeing as he now appears safe, there seems no reason for the ongoing legal stuff, unless there are ongoing issues regarding the 5 children's care which we are not aware of.

Also, they were offered second opinions at 2 other uk centres, but declined them. The specific therapy they want (deemed by their specialist not to be the best treatment in his case) is not available in the uk, but the NHS regularly funds children to go to European centres for this proton beam therapy if there is a good clinical case (obviously for free, there is a special fund for such cases).

The family do not appear to be behaving in a completely rational way, as there is a narrow window of opportunity to give the boy radiotherapy, which was due to be given by his original hospital, and they have not taken him to the hospital where he can have the proton beam, but to their home in Spain while they try to sell it to raise money, even though the other hospital (in Prague, I think), has offered to take him on and deal with the finances at a later date.

But either way, they don't deserve and should not be in prison, that isn't going to help anyone, and the hospital in the UK have said this is not what they wanted, they just wanted to make sure the boy was safe and not in medical danger.

LittleDucky

Tue, Sep 02 2014, 1:04 pm

FranticFrummie wrote:

That was the case I was referring to. The parents didn't take her to the hospital where she was diagnosed with a rare metabolic disorder. She "just had the flu" so they didn't go to the farther hospital. The second place decided that this disease doesn't exist and they put her through gehenom and back. Decided she was crazy, so although she is a teenager and knows what is going on in her body, what she feels etc (ask a seriously ill teen-many times they know when they relapsed before going to the doctor) they didn't take anything she said seriously. These doctors almost killed her because her parents dared to question authority.

Frumdoc

Tue, Sep 02 2014, 1:25 pm

marina wrote:

proton beam therapy is, to my surprise, an accepted cancer treatment.

Oh yes, although it sounds somewhat snake oil-like, it is accepted as the most advanced type of beam radiotherapy, and vast funds are being channelled into building the necessary equipment and labs in the UK, which this case can only help.

Apparently, the discussion was had about this type of therapy, but it was not proven to be beneficial in his type or location of tumor.

There is a vast area of medical ethics and law surrounding people being "allowed" to make seemingly unwise choices, with the mental capacity to make such choices. In someone who had reasonable intelligence and demonstrates understanding of a decision, the law protects their right to make an "unwise choice", such as to decline a lifesaving treatment, or live in squalor, or decline a lifesaving blood transfusion because of religious beliefs.

In the case of a child, the rights of a parent to make an unwise choice on the child's behalf, which has lifelong impact on the child's health or wellbeing, is fraught with difficulty, similarly in an adult without the mental capacity to properly evaluate the consequences of their choice, such as someone with dementia who declines to go into care or to be looked after at home, and therefore starves, or gets infections through lack of self care. There is a concept in such cases of decisions made on their behalf by other, in their best interests, but this requires multiple assessments and neutral legal counsel, and gets prolonged and complicated.

Frumdoc

Tue, Sep 02 2014, 1:27 pm

LittleDucky wrote:

I don't know the details of this case, but it sounds like medical negligence to me.