Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy

[dArKeR]

You may have heard of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. It's the kind of child abuse in which a parent tries to get attention for himself by making his or her own baby sick -- often by smothering the infant.

This bizarre crime was first discovered by Dr. Roy Meadow, a British pediatrician. And ever since, mothers have been prosecuted in Britain and in the United States based on his theories.

But recently, a few of those women have been freed from prison -- and there is now reason to believe that some of Meadow's theories are tragically wrong.

In Britain, at least 250 criminal convictions are being reviewed in Britain. But that's not all. It appears that hundreds of other parents have had their children taken away for good because of Meadow's questionable testimony.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/19/60II/main612675.shtml

[TNDemo]

1. That would not surprise me.

While there are some crazy people who will attempt to make their kid sick so they can get attention, I think it is much rarer than presumed. I think there is a fine line between a very concerned mother and what they see as MBP. I used to worry that they would think that about me when I knew something was wrong with my kid (and eventually it proved out). It reminds me of all the convictions of people over these crazy daycare sex abuse scandals of the 1980s.

[dArKeR]

2. I'd also like to see the convicted's income/wealth level compared to those

charged and released income/wealth level.

[pop goes the weasel]

3. Thank you for this

I will be passing this article on to a group of people who have a gene that causes dislocations, bruising, and skin tears. False charges of child abuse are a big fear because of it.

[Wonk]

4. mp3 of that here

3 M

[Lexingtonian]

5. The theory isn't so much wrong

as it's the transformation of it into some kind of dogmatic fiction that is corrupt.

I worked in a pretty famous pediatric hospital covering a population of about twenty million for a couple of years. They caught two mothers with MSbP in ten years. One they have videotape of poking her kid with a needle for a droplet of blood and dripping that into the kid's urine sample. The disorder definitely exists.

However, 250 cases of MSbP is absurd. I'd be surprised if all of Great Britain has more than two or three genuine instances of it per year.

[kskiska]

6. This reminds me of the "crib death" study

based on one doctor's published paper in a medical journal. He attributed crib deaths to apnea (a baby's failure to breathe properly), and struck fear into the hearts of parents, causing them to purchase expensive monitoring systems, from which, I believe, he profited. As it turned out, quite a number of "crib deaths," when investigated, were due to murder by a parent. Criminal charges were filed in several prominent cases.

The Death of Innocents : A True Story of Murder, Medicine, and High-Stake Science
by Jamie Talan (Author), Richard Firstman (Author)

[lazarus]

7. SIDS

Is a very real syndrome, however. I lost my son to this mysterious killer. And had we not had a heart monitor for my daughter, born 2 years later, neither my wife or I would have survived. We had gone 3 or 4 days without sleep when our families finally got us the monitor.

One of the things that pisses me off the most about the Bush family is that Bush1 cut SIDS research funding every year he was in office.

Oddly enough, Pat Buchanan and Jerry Brown are the only presidential candidates I've ever heard discuss the horrible infant mortality rate in this country.

[SoCalDem]

8. Tony, the little boy born the same day as my son

died from it at 4 months.. His Mom and I shared a hospital room, while she was there. (I was there for 11 days, and had several happy roommates).. It was all "sunshine and flowers" on "their" side of the room, and nothing but horror and sadness on my side.. Our child had a serious birth defect and parenthood was introduced to us with a jagged sledghammer...

anyway, Tony's Mom would sit with me on my bed at night and comfort me.. When she took Tony home, she was the happiest woman on earth, and we kept in touch, even though we were making many trips back and forth to Mayo Clinic..

After one such trip, I took my son and went to visit them, and was SHOCKED to find out that sweet little Tony had gone down for a nap one day and never woke up..

He was a very loved child, and they were utterly devastated. The irony hung in the air, as we sat and cried together...this time for HER sorrow over the loss of her child..(the perfect one), and my "tough-as-nails" imperfect child went through hell and back 28 times in his first 8 yrs, but came through it all , happy, well adjusted, smart and relatively healthy.. You just never know :cry: