Parents sue state
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An Utah couple has sued the State of Utah, Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS) Director Richard Anderson, state social worker Kari Cunningham, assistant attorney general Susan Eisenman, Intermountain Health Care (IHC), three IHC physicians, Lars Wagner, David Corwin, and Cheryl Coffin, and University of Utah physician Karen Albritton for violating their constitutional right to decide the best course of treatment for their son, Parker.
The parents claim that the physicians, the hospital, and the State attempted to force their son to undergo a year’s worth of chemotherapy to combat Ewing’s sarcoma by charging the parents with neglect. As it turns out, there was only a preliminary indication that a mass might have been Ewing’s sarcoma but no follow-up was done. When the parents pressed for more definative testing the physicians and hospital filed a medical neglect complaint and the State of Utah tried to remove Parker. The doctors wanted to leave the cancerous cells inside Parker to make it easier to guage the effectiveness of the chemotherapy they were pushing for.
When the additional testing was finally done, there still was no conclusion that Parker had Ewing’s sarcoma and the State dropped the charges since Parker wasn’t cooperating with them either. The result at the time was the State of Utah passing two bills to reaffirm a parent’s right to determine appropriate treatment for a child.
Now, Parker’s parents are going a step further and trying to hold these people accountable for their rush to chemo. This seems to be entirely appropriate to me.
Certainly if a parent is neglecting the medical needs of a child the State should have the ability to step in and see that the child gets the care that is needed. However, the parents in this case only committed the crime of delaying treatment until more and better information was given to them. That is, they were charged with medical neglect for asking questions and refusing treatment until they were informed about what they were up against.
Searching for “informed patient” on Google turns up around 1,250,000 hits so the idea that there should be active patient involvement in treatment decisions is neither anything new or undesirable. Yet these particular doctors apparently had such a God Complex that they had to be obeyed regardless of treatment questions lingering the minds of the parents and the patient.
This is shameful treatment. In my opinion, the doctors should lose their licenses to practice medicine and the State workers involved should lose their credentials as well. And I wish them the best getting accustomed to asking “Would you like fries with that?”
MickC @ July 19, 2005