Children, medicine, parents and the law

[Russ]

This was in the weekend magazine today
http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/bitter-pills-20121008-277yj.html

Interesting article to read if you have a spare 5-10 minutes. It raises a few points as well. What's the deal with kids and their medical care, since doctors and parents having different opinions on treatment will happen reasonably commonly. How important is it for parents to be able to control the treatment of their child and how do we deal with situations of medical orthodoxy having very polarised views on treatment?

The different stories the journalist followed up were reasonably solid and you can see a) absurd bureaucracy at work as well as b) the divide between CAM/integrative therapy/'bio'medicine/whatever you call it and mainstream medicine.

It's obviously a very sad and emotionally charged area, but it's extremely concerning that you can have these two different perspectives on the same process, especially here in Australia.

[ninwa]

Doctors, in combination with social workers and the courts, have a lot of power that can be used to override the rights of the parents to choose their child's medical treatment.

Reminds me of Marion's case which basically said the parents could not carry out a major procedure (sterilisation) on their extremely mentally impaired daughter without a court order

[brenden]

Wow. Absolutely disgusting examples outlined in the article but at the same time, there would also be the psychotic types of parents that would have their child dead before treated in which case, forced treatment would be the most humane option. This would be an absolute nightmare to legislate on fairly for all. The only thing I can think of is having to get a court order in order to actually notify DHS (or DoCs or whatever etc etc) where medical conditions are concerned (separate to physical/mental abuse etc). However it sounds like this wouldn't make a difference and the court file would just be stamped and sent on to DHS.
In this area, whilst trying to maintain a balanced viewpoint not influenced by the article, it seems the power of the practitioners/DHS are too absolute to prevent any form of power abuse.
It would be very difficult to minimise the extent of the power whilst still ensuring that practitioners are still able to exercise the power when it's absolutely appropriate.
Very interesting article indeed.

[mark_alec]

Umm, what is a "biomedical doctor"?