Andrea Dumlop

Beata signs her email XOXO.

As he appears to do with many of his patients, Dr. Kirkpatrick recorded videos of his evaluations of Maya.

And these are frankly strange to watch.

As we discussed in the last episode, Maya's alleged condition, complex regional pain syndrome, is, well, regional.

And it's a condition that begins with some kind of injury.

Yet in Dr. Kirkpatrick's evaluation of a wheelchair-bound Maya, he's asking her about pain everywhere, from her cheeks to her shoulders to her feet and the skin on the top of her thigh.

Reading Dr. Kirkpatrick's depositions and watching his testimony, it's tough to wrap your brain around how he justifies giving Maya this diagnosis, which he describes as severe and progressive in her case.

He says in a deposition that while CRPS is usually triggered by an injury, that quote, often we don't know what causes it in children because they're quote, not good record keepers on account of how much they're quote, bouncing around.

Which, sure, they are, but as a mom of a seven-year-old and a three-year-old, I can tell you that children are not especially stoic when they hurt themselves.

It is, in fact, usually an entire opera.

Anyway, according to Beata, Maya's CRPS symptoms allegedly began with an asthma attack.

which even Kirkpatrick says there's no known connection with.

And yet right away, in the first appointment, Beata gets the CRPS diagnosis she's been looking for, and they're off to their races scheduling a four-day-long ketamine infusion.

Here, Beata asks Dr. Kirkpatrick about the side effects.

Now, it's not unheard of to use ketamine in treating CRPS, as Dr. Elliot Crane, the pediatric pain specialist we heard from in the last episode, explains on the stand.

However, Dr. Crane emphasized that ketamine is used as a last resort for refractory pain or pain that won't resolve any other way and is used at a very low dose.

So it's possible that a child with CRPS might need to receive some type of ketamine treatment at some point.

However, as a reminder, three hospitals, Johns Hopkins All Children's, Lurie's Children's in Chicago and Tampa General had all evaluated Maya and determined that she was suffering from a conversion disorder.

And interestingly, the standard of care for conversion disorder is the same as that for CRPS, physical and occupational therapy and psychotherapy.

But that was not Dr. Kirkpatrick's way of doing things.