Dr. Jim Hamilton
Appearances
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep08: They Saw You
What's important in distinguishing medical child abuse from other cases is not whether there's medical evidence of an illness or not. It's evidence that there's misinformation, disinformation, misrepresenting to one doctor what another doctor has said. In some cases, evidence that a substance has been given. The mere inability to find an explanation for symptoms isn't in and of itself.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep08: They Saw You
evidence of medical child abuse there has to be evidence that the accused caregiver is actively doing things to create a false impression and again moving toward the idea that this is more like a prolonged exploitive type of abuse rather than an event related type of abuse like physical abuse or sometimes sexual abuse you can't make that case
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep08: They Saw You
If you're looking for big, boffo, clear evidence like suffocation or poisoning that the mother is causing the child symptoms, it's evidence that's revealed through an excruciatingly careful examination of the medical records, comparing the timelines of this doctor and that doctor, and did this doctor really say that?
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep08: They Saw You
This whole thing, this whole drama plays out like a game of telephone, for those of us who are old enough to remember things like telephones, where Somebody says something, and when that information is passed along to the next person, it's changed, it's manipulated, and then that person takes that and passes it on to the next.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep08: They Saw You
In the end, you have a bunch of doctors who all think the other doctors were on board with the parents' explanation of what was going on and everything made sense and they agreed and there was a diagnosis, etc., And it's really not true.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep08: They Saw You
When the doctors get together and conference about these cases, as they often do when suspicions arise, they are sort of shocked to realize how much they misunderstood what the other doctors were thinking and doing based on the distorted reports they were getting from the mother.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep08: They Saw You
It's terrible when there's so much focus on sick or not sick. I like to say when I do one of these cases and testify, you could take 100 people and line them up along a third baseline of a baseball field and hit each one in the knee with a bat using a mechanical device that makes it the exact same injury. And 10 of those people will never walk again.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep08: They Saw You
And 10 of them will rub some dirt on it and continue to play the game. And then, you know, the people in the middle might go to the emergency room or they might go to their doctor later, but given an actual provable objective injury, a back to the knee, you're going to get a wide variety of illness behaviors, a wide variety of actions taken, health care seeking, et cetera.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep08: They Saw You
And and so even somebody who has AHC a family where there is a AHC, there are going to be people who are afraid and they ignore and deny it. They're going to be people who, you know, acknowledge it, but try to kind of give their child the best life they could possibly have, even if they have this disease. And then there's going to be the rare case like the Hartman case where It's used as a lever.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep08: They Saw You
It's used as a purchase to get attention, to manipulate others. You know, in some of these cases, some satisfaction of being able to control and manipulate others and exercise entitlement, et cetera. So the presence or absence of the illness is almost irrelevant to the discussion and evaluation of whether someone has medical child abuse.