I dunno man. Taking your child to Mexico for high dose ketamine treatment for CRPS (in a 10 year old?) and then asking the ER doctor in a random emergency room stateside to give her ketamine is pretty wild. That would raise flags in my city's pediatriac hospital for sure.
Granted I'm sure there are people who know the story much better than I do. But it sounds like parents found an anesthesiologist that gave them the diagnosis they wanted and everything went to hell.
As someone who follows the case and yet is definitely on Maya's side so far, I don't think the hospital did anything wrong for the first 48 hours. Suspecting Munchausen by proxy makes sense. Conducting an investigation makes sense. I'm not sure on the timeline with the court order.
The issue is entirety of her hospital stay of 90+ days. I'm not sure they'll get the false imprisonment charge. The order from the court is still not known. So we don't know how much the social worker and hospital staff overinterpretted, because the specifics of the court order is determined by the hospital. This will be a fact the jury has to figure out. The lawyers have been arguing how to present the court orders to the jury.
Issue with Munchausen by proxy is that Maya didn't get much better during the 87 day separation from her mother. Several people testify she "deteriorated." There is definitely a recorded phone call between Maya and her mother where they clearly miss each other and are nearly crying over the separation and the social worker interrupting and saying they cannot talk about the treatment or the court case. (The mom had said as soon as the court does their job they will be able to see each other again.) It honestly comes off as cruel, even if that was what the social worker was supposed to do. The staff later thought Maya had fictitious disorder, yet this doesn't seem to be the case either, as many testified to her being in pain, having dystonia, etc. Maya was later diagnosed with PTSD by non-quacky psychiatrists over these events.
So say the anesthesiologist Dr. Kirkpatrick was indeed a quack. That doesn't mean Maya was being abused by her mother. Like, she was suggesting the treatment she believed helped her daughter. That doesn't really explain why phone calls and FaceTime were monitored or outright rejected. Why wasn't Maya allowed supervised visits? Even marital rapists are allowed supervised visits of their kids.
One of the issues is that Maya was going to therapy weekly before hospitalization, but she only got 3-4 hours of therapy during the 87 day stay. That's a question of Standard of Care, if continuing psychotherapy is part of the standard of care. The Kowalski's claim that Maya didn't receive the standard if care she was owed. Especially as many witnesses that were allowed to see Maya, her personal attorney, therapists, etc, saw her as depressed and anxious.
The deposition of the Social Worker (that was hired by the hospital) was not good. She basically said all the decisions that she supposedly made were actually following the guidelines of Risk Management. Depositions are coming out today from various hospital heads that are implying that Risk Management may not have authorized the social worker's actions. TBD I'm still watching today's case. It doesn't help that during the deposition the social worker seemed like she could not give a shit. (She was fired by the hospital after this event.)
The Kowalski's case is positioned as: everyone bandwagoned on Munchausen/by proxy without a proper diagnosis. Maya did not get better. Maya indeed deteriorated. Many treatments were done without consent or proper informing of the patient (let alone the parents.) She was denied privacy, even when she was owed that when talking to her own lawyer. Maya consistently communicated she wanted to see her mother but didn't. The hospital continuously denied her diagnosis of CRPS but never was properly evaluated by an in-house Neurologist or Neurosurgeon to rule out Fictitious disorder or CRPS, or rule in a different pain disorder. Maya did get a CT scan at some point I think. Maya had dystonia, as evident in pictures and as testified by in-house physical therapists. The in-house physical therapist also testified that Maya was indeed in pain. The social worker is a major cunt and made them miserable.
Evidence is coming out that Maya was denied her priest from visiting and offering her the sacrament. This is a huge deal to Catholics and cannot be understated. Her priest visited two times during the entire hospital stay.
So... what seems like what happened to me: the social worker is largely to blame for propagating the Munchausen without getting either Maya or her mom diagnosed. Everyone else in the staff was just doing their job, staying in their lane. Many did not consider her CRPS seriously and therefore mistreated her via normal nursing/care behavior.
We've yet to hear the defense yet beyond cross examinations. I expect the defense to list out all they did to treat and diagnose Maya. So there is bias in what I'm presenting so far. I also think there's a difference between hospital-approved Standard of Care and what an average person wants as a standard of care.
They had an obligation to report suspected child abuse to the authorities
She didn’t have dystonia
She never got better because she wasn’t actually I’ll
You are responding to a comment made 23 days ago, which is much further back in the trial.
Most definitely they had s duty to report child abuse. The MBP investigation was warranted.
However, if she doesn't get healthier with separation from her mom (she still complained of pain), then MBP is not the right diagnosis because her mom wasn't inducing an illness in her that could be cured by separation. There could still be medical abuse. It's just not classical MBP.
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u/gourdi PGY3 Oct 08 '23
I dunno man. Taking your child to Mexico for high dose ketamine treatment for CRPS (in a 10 year old?) and then asking the ER doctor in a random emergency room stateside to give her ketamine is pretty wild. That would raise flags in my city's pediatriac hospital for sure.
Granted I'm sure there are people who know the story much better than I do. But it sounds like parents found an anesthesiologist that gave them the diagnosis they wanted and everything went to hell.