Re: Profile of suspected MSBP perpetrators

[Brian Morgan <brianmorgan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thank you James.

A very small number of US academics and medico legal experts share this view -
Dr Eric Mart, a psychologist who testifies has published a paper criticising
this approach, based on Bayesian theory. Professors David Allison and Mark
Roberts of Stony Brook have just published a book - Disordered Mothers or
Disordered Diagnosis, critically examining the history of MSBP and
incorporating similar ideas to Mart's. One UK expert has attacked the profile:
Professor Colin Morley now works in Australia and is effectively out of the
arena. US lawyer Tom Ryan says powerful things about pseudo or junk science -
emperor's clothes - diagnosis de jour - that sort of thing.

What you  find difficult believe is I'm afraid to say true.

There are powerful forces at play with eminent doctors prepared to use the
profile, without even seeing their patients - Do you know of Drs Herbert
Schreier and Judith Libow in the US who wrote the book Hurting for Love - and
in the UK Professor David Southall.

The big problem with the diagnosis is that it is made by excluding genuine
illness in the child - at some point the clinicians stop looking for an
illness in the child (that is when they have so far found nothing to explain
the symptoms being displayed or described) and start applying the profile to
the parent, usually the mother, as a suspected fabricator or imposer of a
fictitious illness.

But stopping looking for an illness can mean that a so far undiagnosed illness
gets overlooked  - in  cases I have studied conditions such as phenytoin
syndrome remained undiagnosed - in another polymyositis - hyperallergy in
another - and in a current case it looks rather as though Turner's syndrome in
the girl and undescended testicles in a 7 year old boy have been overlooked
through focussing on the mother as a suspeted MSBP case.

Dr Vera Scheibner in Australia actuall goes further to suggest that MSBP is
used - misused - to silence parents who have complained about the failure of
doctors to make a diagnosis - often in cases of alleged vaccine damage.

I have encountered numerous cases where the trigger for the allegations of
MSBP is a complaint against a doctor, threat of legal action etc, and this is
a very effective weapon, since very few cases of MSBP get thrown out in the
courts.

Any ideas for moving this forward as a programme of research?


James Hord wrote:

> Brian,
> Just a quick response.....
>
> > A number of child abuse experts use a 'profile' of around two dozen
> > features said to be associated with perpetrators of Munchausen Syndrome
> > by Proxy child abuse in order to confirm that a suspected abuser is
> > another such case.
> Brian,
> No such list of features can "confirm" that a certain behavioral pattern
> exists.  That is akin to "confirming" that all UK professionls have
> computers, using the data from this list of mail participants.
>
> >
> > There are supporters for this method of working and others who say it is
> > unscientific.
>
> AMEN.
> >
> > Nevertheless, confirmations of an MSBP diagnosis using this method have
> > been accepted as legitimate in the USA and the UK.
>
> Very difficult to believe, Brian.....
>
> You cannot generalize from a list, to a specific.  An individual is a
> specific entity.   While the "hit" rate may beat chance in a large group of
> similar cases, you cannot point to a singular case and decide the specific
> feature.  If 60%, 80%, or 98% of all college students have IQs of 115 or
> better, that does not mean that a particular student has an IQ of 115 or
> better......  simple logic.
>
> Jim Hord, Ph.D.
> Clinical Psychologist