Andrea Dunlop

So there are parents who over-medicalize their kids or take their kids on some weird medical odyssey because they're having anxiety, because they've been come into contact with a strange anti-vax adjacent group that's given them some bad ideas about what to do medically for their children.

Those things are harmful as well.

Those are different situations that need to be handled differently.

So I just want to say that because there is a lot of confusion about, well, does a parent really think their kid's sick?

Are they having a delusion about their child being sick?

Some parents do have that, but that's not what Munchausen by proxy abuse is.

It's exactly what you said.

It's very premeditated and it's very much a pattern of abuse.

It's committed over a long period of time and it's extremely persistent and it looks different at different stages.

So often you see premature birth, for example, that comes up a lot in these cases.

We strongly believe in most cases that's something that the parent causes.

We have perpetrators who have

fessed up to that, to inducing birth early.

And then, of course, the child has legitimate issues if a child's born early.

A lot of these feeding issues that you mentioned where they get a failure to thrive diagnosis, but they're just actually not feeding the child.

Then they're lying about it at the doctor and they're saying, oh, the child is spitting up everything I feed them.

And so then you end up with

Children having invasive procedures.

This procedure called a Neeson fund application comes up a lot where they're actually having a surgery to correct reflux that isn't happening.

You get the feeding tubes.