Parents sue St. Luke's over unwanted medical treatment

KTVB News ^ | Tuesday, August 9, 2005 | Associated Press

[Polybius]

never indicated that I thought untreated meningitis was not deadly, You have made your point and you are in my opinion a medical tyrant. I do not wish to have this thread turn into a verbal pushing match. So this will be my last post on this. The original point the attending MD thought the child MAY have meningitis, the mother based on the child's symptoms getting better disagreed, the tyrant did not like having his OPINION questioned so he had the child kidnapped under the color of law and preformed a procedure that has significant risk against the parents wishes.

Yes. He thought the patient may have a 5% to 10% chance of meningitis.

That equals a 5% to 10% chance of almost certain death if not promptly diagnosed and treated.

I wish you well and hope your motivation is the care of your patients and not ego or fear of lawsuit

My specialty is radiology so I have zero involvement with the decisions as to whether a child in the ER needs a spinal tap or not.

I may be sued for all sorts of different types of medical cases but ordering or not ordering a spinal tap for a child is not one of them.

So, my point of view has absolutely nothing to do with lawsuits and everything to do with sparing the child a 5% to 10% chance of certain death.

You don't play Russian Roulette with children's lives at 1:10 or 1:20 odds of certain death when the alternative is 1:300 odds of a complication that is very rarely death.

Regardless of what I believe, the State authorities believe that you do not subject a child to a 5% to 10% risk of almost certain death in order to avoid a procedure that is routinely performed in ER's every day and which has a proven significant complication rate of less than one case out of every 300. ( and "significant complications" in this procedure is almost never death ) .

As I said before, if there is a medical procedure where the benefit to risk ratio is more or less the same, the Law will happily allow parents to make the choice.

However, when parents refuse a treatment or other course of action that puts the child at an unacceptable risk of death, the Law steps in.

For example:

The woman on a recent FR thread that accidentally locked her infant in hot car this summer was arrested after she tried to prevent firemen from breaking the car window to rescue the child. She instead wanted to go home and get her extra set of car keys. She later claimed that her concern was that the breaking glass would hurt the child. The Law decided that, even if the mother's worst fears come true, a cut baby was acceptable but a dead baby was not.

The law enforcement agencies stepped in and did not allow the mother to make a choice of leaving that infant in a broiling car for 10 extra minutes as that could very easily have resulted in the death of her child.

A medical case would be the Law stepping in when parents refuse treatment for Hodgkin's Lymphoma (85% cure rate with therapy). The Law decides that, a 15% chance of a dead child is acceptable but a 100% chance of a dead child is not.

[sarasmom]

I do thank my lucky stars.
What I don't do, anymore, is blindly trust the medical community on health issues.
The "difference" a diagnosis makes involving inflamations of the menenges (brain and spinal tissues)has concrete ramifications for local, state and federal governments.
I am aware that other diseases also have specific reporting requirements and procedures that are supposed to be followed to prevent epidemics and/or focus the local medical community,CDC, and government attention on at risk populations.
Having lived for many years in a tourist state...
It is not just someones private health problem.