Andrea Dunlop

abuse doesn't actually sort of reach the life-threatening threshold.

We see a lot of things that fall into these kind of more mystery illnesses, a lot of neurological conditions, things that cannot be tested one way or the other.

Right.

Anything that's susceptible to a lot of interpretation on part of the caregiver is especially worrisome in these cases.

And they often pick these sort of extremely vanishingly rare neurological disorders where there's one expert in the entire country.

And so they go on this whole odyssey.

We do see other things that are a little bit more well known.

Cystic fibrosis is one that comes up quite often.

Partly because that's a pretty easy test to mess with.

That's tested by putting a patch to collect a child's salt content of their sweat called sweat test.

And so we've had one of the first perpetrators that we covered on the show, Hope Ybarra, doctored that test essentially with nasal spray that has salt in it.

There are things like that where they're actually messing with the test.

But there are many other cases where they have some condition where there isn't a blood test or a genetic test or some really easy sort of black and white this kid has or they don't.

And of course, there are a lot of things like that in medicine.

There are a lot of legitimate conditions that don't show up on a test like that.

So unfortunately, I think most people don't realize how easy it is to pull this abuse off.

You do not have to be a mastermind.

You just have to be a person with Google.

There are a couple of elements about this abuse that make it particularly disturbing to people.

And I want to highlight that this abuse is characterized by intentional deception.