Saturday, February 1, 2020

Justina Pelletier: Massachusetts: Ongoing trial: Family medical malpractice lawsuit: Her father recalls the parents removal from the hospital as ‘like a punch in the stomach,' The Boston Herald (Reporters Tonya Alanez and Emily Sweeney) report... "On Valentine’s Day 2013, Justina Pelletier’s parents were escorted from Boston Children’s Hospital and told not to return. The state took custody of their 14-year-old daughter and held her in a psychiatric unit “It was like a punch in the stomach,” Lou Pelletier recalled Friday as he testified in the family’s medical malpractice suit against the hospital and his daughter’s caregivers. He and his wife, Linda, were made to feel that “we were the ones who were causing her medical issues and we needed to be separated," he told jurors in Suffolk Superior Court. “We had done nothing of any such nature,” he said. “We were accused of it, and we were fighting for our daughter’s life.”


BACKGROUND:  "The malpractice lawsuit case her family has brought against Boston's 'Children's Hospital' - is under way.  As the Boston Globe reports...."Justina Pelletier was 14 in 2013 when she landed in a locked psychiatric unit at Boston Children’s Hospital, temporarily a ward of the state. Her parents stood accused of medical child abuse as they clashed with the hospital’s doctors over her diagnosis and care......... (Justine, now 21, and her parents accuse Children’s and its providers of ignoring in 2013 the treatment advice of her doctors at Tufts Medical Center, where Justina was being treated for mitochondrial disease, a group of rare genetic disorders that affects how cells produce energy. The family also accuses the hospital and its providers of violating their civil rights by barring the Pelletiers from seeing their daughter, and by warning the state would take custody of Justina if they didn’t consent to the doctors’ treatment plan.)"

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QUOTES OF THE DAY: "As their relations with the hospital broke down, Lou Pelletier said, he became increasingly distrustful of the doctors. “It was their way or no way,” he testified. The doctors, he said, were becoming more hostile toward him and his wife. An e-mail shown to jurors from Boston Children’s Hospital psychiatrist Colleen Ryan to a social worker seemed to support his perception. Ryan, a provider named in the lawsuit, wrote that she was concerned about the Pelletiers “touching her so much,” their negative comments, and whether they would comply with doctors’ wishes not to discuss their daughter’s symptoms in her presence. “They are evil,” Ryan wrote.  In other e-mails, Ryan wrote, “Reality thinking is not intact and we are headed towards a lawsuit with this family." “I’m a sliver away from banning them from the facility,” she wrote. Doctors believed the child would benefit from intensive psychological treatment and therapy. But her father resisted, saying he didn’t believe in “psychological baloney,” records show. The parents insisted their daughter suffered from mitochondrial disease, like one of her older sisters. The condition is often inherited."

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The Pelletiers allege that the pediatric hospital violated their civil rights by placing their daughter in state custody, leaving her emotionally scarred and fearful of doctors to this day. They also allege that her four caregivers were negligent when they ignored plans put in place by her former doctors at Tufts Medical Center. Those doctors had diagnosed her with mitochondrial disease. Doctors at Boston Children’s diagnosed her problems as psychiatric. The standoff over her care drew intense media attention and sparked a debate over when doctors can override parental rights in treatment decision."

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