Posted on 11/01/2006 4:38:55 PM PST by Piefloater
IN a controversial treatment, doctors in the US have given a severely disabled child drugs to keep her small and 'manageable' for her parents.
In a report published in a medical journal this month, the doctors described a six-year-old girl with profound, irreversible developmental disability who was given high doses of estrogen to permanently halt her growth so that her parents could continue to care for her at home.
The controversial growth-attenuation treatment, which included hysterectomy, was requested by the child's parents and initiated after careful consultation and review by an ethics committee.
In their report in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, doctors Daniel F. Gunther and Douglas S. Diekema, both at the University of Washington in Seattle, explained the reasoning behind what they hoped would generate healthy debate.
Dr Gunther is at the Division of Pediatric Endocrinology, and Dr Diekema is at the Centre for Pediatric Bioethics.
Caring for children with profound developmental disabilities could be difficult and demanding, they said.
For children with severe combined neurologic and cognitive impairment who are unable to move without assistance, all the necessities of life – dressing, bathing, transporting – must be provided by caregivers, usually parents, and these tasks become increasing difficult, if not impossible, as the child increases in size.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.au ...
With extreme difficulty or, in the alternative, by having to hand off their child to a long-term care center to live out the rest of his/her natural life. IMHO, better to be short and at home, where it seems that this child will be loved and cared for, instead of in a long term facility, where it's a crapshoot.
So please explain to me just what kind of freaking "ethics" committee this was!
If your mind was permanently stuck at an infant's cognitive level, you wouldn't care what size you were or why. However, this child sounds likely to be able to perceive the difference between being cared for by loving parents and being put in an institution to be cared for by a revolving cast of shift-workers. That was going to be the choice if she grew to adult size. Aging parents aren't necessarily able to lift a 150 pound person in and out of a super-crib, in and out of the bath, in and out of a car, etc.
Keeping severely mentally impaired children from reaching full size isn't necessarily just a matter of "convenience", it can be a matter of safety. When children who are prone to physical aggression or uncontrolled movements reach adult or near-adult size, they can often pose a serious danger to their parents, siblings, and non-family caregivers.
One woman who used to post on FR, and has a mildly autistic child of her own, told of a friend of hers who was determined not to put her severely mentally disabled (autistic) son in an institution. Among other things, this involved locking him in a padded room in the attic every night, both for his own safety and that of other family members. Still, when he reached his teens, the extreme measures which had defined the household for years weren't enough anymore. Eventually they institutionalized him, but it was only after one of his unpredictable bouts of violence had inflicted permanent vision damage on a younger sibling.
So, you're saying there's no benefit for the child in a cochlear implant?
But what's your point? There's absolutely a benefit to this child to be kept small -- the constant care, love, and attention of her parents instead of shift-workers.
not typically. when they are that profoundly disabled, and
their own families cannot take care of them they are either
placed in residential facilities or caregivers are hired to
support the family. either of those situations may not be the
same quality of care the family would provide.
this family wants to care for their own daughter.
(/sarc)
-A8
While I find the situation sad, I don't find it "sickening" at all.
I can't criticize the parents for their decision.
"Through last week, Charlie Crist collected $18,843,273.81 in hard-dollar campaign contributions. He has received another $3.2-million in in-kind donations."
his ad budget is not included above.
And you don't think removing someone's arms and legs is of a different quality entirely than of keeping someone small? We're not talking infant small here...
-A8
And of an entirely different moral quality. Stunting growth -- so that someone remains the size of a little person -- and cutting off limbs, causing pain (the point of amputation continues to grow and change and must have repeated surgery) and causing substantial, obvious, and often painful deformity are two very different things.
How sickening. Maybe you can even think of some other ways to deform her to make things easier for the people around her. Why don't you get started right now?
Imagine that they had detected this condition in utero, but the parents wanted to keep the child. Would you support "administering mediciation" (e.g. thalidomide) that prevented the development of the child's arms and legs?
-A8
-A8
I can't believe that some of you people are serious. Do you honestly think that it's better to send the kid off to an institution once she becomes too big for her parents to handle?
Okay, let's see, let's just keep her "whole" and send her off to an institution. Then when she has a baby because some orderly raped her, or when she becomes unresponsive to kisses and cuddles because she has lost the ability to respond to them because they are a rare occurrence, talk to me about which was better FOR THE CHILD: giving her a hormone to keep her about 4 feet tall and surrounding her with the love of her family, to which the article says she can respond, or letting her grow to full size and being at the mercy of strangers.
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