Andrea Dunlop

And also because this is happening so much in the medical system.

creates additional barriers, right?

Doctors who are seeing a patient for the first time are not going to go on some odyssey, make sure everything the parent's telling them is correct.

They could not do their jobs.

That's not plausible.

And so now the doctor in that specific case absolutely did have suspicions of abuse that she didn't report.

And that is the rare doctor who I feel like is extremely culpable for what happened to this child.

A lot of doctors, they're just doing their jobs the way they do their jobs.

And perpetrators are extremely canny about exploiting all of those weaknesses within the system.

Yes, this is, again, a really common thing.

And it's part of the sort of profile of abusers is they do this kind of love bombing behavior with people that they want on their side.

And so they do that really do a lot to ingratiate themselves with a particular doctor.

And doctors are humans.

Some of them are more susceptible to this behavior than others.

And they're very good at finding the doctors that are the doctors that want to be the heroes.

The doctors, they'll come in, they'll tell them, all these other doctors have not been able to figure out what's wrong with my child and you're the only doctor and you're so brilliant.

And they are writing all these social media posts about them and they're sending them gifts and they're bringing them cookies and they get their cell phone numbers and they're calling them.

And I think Dr. Ness from the season six case, this is my favorite kind of anecdote about this, is that when the child ends up on hospice care, Dr. Ness is in the apartment, celebrated pediatric neurologist, for some reason cleaning the mom's oven.

Yeah, again, like I think doctors have to be really careful with their boundaries.

And there's all kinds of reasons parents in more benign ways might try and bulldoze a doctor's boundaries or just because they're just a regular pushy parent or whatever.