Andrea Dunlop

And I mean, mitosis by proxy abuse is not a new phenomenon.

It got its official name in the 70s, but it's probably been around since time immemorial.

However, in the modern era, it is so much easier to pull off.

It used to be that most people who are perpetrators worked in the medical field because those were the people that had the knowledge to pull it off, right?

And those were the people that could go and get medical textbooks and describe symptoms.

Now, anyone can do that, right?

Pretty instantaneously.

And

Online search history comes up a lot in the police investigations of these cases and can be very relevant, right?

And so the Sophie Hartman case in particular, I remember she was Googling all of these conditions.

She was Googling what looked like her plans for the next condition she was going to bring up and that kind of thing.

And so you can just see how that makes this absolutely runaway thing.

I'm very interested in how this phenomenon is spilled over into people that do not have

Munchausen or Munchausen by proxy behaviors, but everyone sort of self-diagnosing online, people seeing TikTok videos and becoming convinced that they have some condition or another.

I think we're in like just an overall terrifying moment of medical misinformation, especially with the RFK Jr.

of it all.

So I think it's an interesting context to be talking about this.

An extraordinary element of the Lisa McDaniel story was that she ended up working as the director of patient advocacy for a very prominent foundation, the Guthrie Jackson Foundation, that was dedicated to the disease that her son allegedly had.

She worked as their director of patient advocacy for 13 years, and this was someone who had been convicted.

of Munchausen by proxy abuse with her older child.