Boston Hospital Kidnapping of Teenage Girl Allowed to Continue

Health Impact News Editor Comments

Imagine, if you can, what it would be like to take your child into a hospital for emergency medical treatment, and then be told that the medical treatment you had been following previously, at the recommendation from your doctors, was wrong. They tell you that your daughter was not suffering from mitochondrial disorder at all, but instead was suffering from psychosomatic symptoms that needed psychiatric care.

You disagree, and so you want to discharge your daughter from Boston Children’s Hospital and take her to Tufts Medical Center, where she had previously received treatment. Under their care, your daughter has been leading a fairly normal life, and she had just been competing at an ice skating event a few weeks earlier. But instead, Boston Children’s Hospital calls in Child “Protection”, who then award custody of your child to the hospital. You are now involved in a long legal custody battle for 10 months, while not being allowed to take your daughter out of the hospital where she is being held prisoner.

Finally you get a trial before a real judge, with the hopes this judge will act with common sense and allow your daughter to come home for Christmas.

But no, that didn’t happen. The judge leaves your daughter in the care of the hospital, because after all, in America everyone knows that the Medical Community knows what’s best for everyone. It doesn’t matter that hospitals are now the third leading cause of death in the United States, or that psychiatric diagnoses are completely subjective with no objective biological testing. Even when mistakes are made, it is all done for the “greater good” of society, and the pharmaceutical companies, doctors, psychiatrists, and others within the medical system get to define “good.”

Read the background on the story of Justina Pelletier here.

By Patricia Wen and Neil Swidey
Boston Globe

Excerpts: A juvenile court judge in Boston ruled today that the state will retain custody of 15-year-old Justina Pelletier for the time being, but also appointed an independent investigator to take a new look at her case. The decision extends the legal and medical saga involving Pelletier, who has spent the past 10 months at Boston Children’s Hospital, most of it in a locked psychiatric ward.

“I don’t understand how they can do this. I didn’t do anything wrong,” her mother, Linda Pelletier, said as she left the courtroom, sobbing.

Her red-faced father, Lou, said, “It’s a [expletive] corrupt state” as he left.

Full Story Here.