Intersex Infant - Surgical abuse

[tinkerbell]

     http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=1020467&fr=ush1-mail





tink

[Caroline]

*shudders*
I'm lost for words...

[TheBattler]

Thats is sad



Alice

[Dennis]

Wow. Just wow. It could have been a lot worse if he hadn't had such a good advocate in his mum. I hope they win that lawsuit and the doctor never does that to a child again.

Dennis

[Keira]

The doctor's action are unquestionable, but the mother's affirmation that the child was male from the start was a wrongheaded in my book as the doctor, just with less consequences.

The child itself should have been left to decide later.

In this case, it seems that the decision would have been to continue to affirm this male identity, but I am not comfortable in either the doctor or the mother taking the decision.

[Dennis]

I noticed that too, Keira, and it gave me some discomfort. At least the mother's assertion doesn't wind up with him being irreparably altered physically, but the parents did seem to have an awful lot invested in him being a boy.

Dennis

[Caroline]

Yeah I also noticed that but I got some hope when the mother said about the child being 'more masculine than feminine', at least she seemed open now to the idea that the child's gender may not match what she thinks its genitals are.  The thing is, you can accept a normal person with no medical background not understanding this kind of thing, for the doctor to be so blinded however is totally unacceptable.  (Indeed the medical professionals should be enlightening the parents, not keeping them in the dark)

[buttercup]

What a rotten pig-headed doctor!! 

[Butterfly]

What a horrid story. 

[Christo]

man. thats messed up.  how can u live with urself if u do dat to a little kid? 

[Dennis]

man. thats messed up.  how can u live with urself if u do dat to a little kid? 

Cause doctors have been trained to think they're god. So whatever they think is automatically right. To be fair, though, they have a bloody hard job and perhaps thinking you're god is the only way of coping with patients dying.

In my job, which doesn't, thank god, have people dying (no death penalty here). I have to stop myself from blaming the client, from saying they deserved it, from projecting my point of view as the only right one. We're all human, doctor or lawyer, or anyone else, and maybe the fact that doctors and lawyers get every little judgment analyzed to death and perhaps made the subject of a lawsuit makes some so defensive that they decide that they're god.

That doesn't change the fact that this guy did not have consent to do what he did. He may have messed up a kid's life, and he did it explicitly in contradiction to the parents' instructions. I may see the human reason he did it, but it's a horrible tragedy. And if the doctor can't handle sometimes being wrong, like all of us are, and often being questioned, like many of us are, maybe he should do something else.

Dennis (who is currently a little tired of being questioned, complained about, and human so is thinking of moving into something else)

[Christo]

Dennis (who is currently a little tired of being questioned, complained about, and human so is thinking of moving into something else)

  we all feel like you do bro.  its gonna be ok.

[Dennis]

Dennis (who is currently a little tired of being questioned, complained about, and human so is thinking of moving into something else)

  we all feel like you do bro.  its gonna be ok.

Thanks man. I don't want to track the topic off, but basically, I've always had the ability to make a lot more money than I do. I've chosen the way I want to work so I could help people. I'm thinking lately that I spend a lot more time helping people who are astoundingly ungrateful and maybe I should just divert my practice into making more money. Pondering it.

Dennis

edit: that sounded bad. Gratitude is not what I want. All I want is not to have to spend hours dealing with complaints from clients who don't pay when I've done as good a job for them as for those who do pay.

[tinkerbell]

It would seem that everyone is ID'ing the child as male, but what about the ovary that he was born with?  Are they going to remove it too?  How could this fact interfere with his development in adult life?  Is this ovary active?  Will it ovulate during puberty?   I mean, there are many questions that need to be answered here.... 

tink

[Keira]

Well, the pronoun thing is always a problem in this case, since I do know the ethiquette for IS pronoun I used the male one.

In fact, as I said, both doctor and parent went with their idea of the sex, the family by seemingly being very invested in the kid being male, and the doctor in the opposite.

I think the doctor knows the ovaries are functional and will work at puberty, if not, what he did is even worse (if that's even possible), leaving the kid with no sex hormones at all.

T and E compete in the body, like when a TS takes pills, and depending on how much the person is getting of each, one has more impact on phenotype.

I think that the testes production of T would have been hampered by E production with a resulting lower than normal T and E serum level in the body.

[Wing Walker]

I believe that the surgery was a mistake for two reasons:  1/ It was done under false pretenses.  A biopsy is not a surgical excision.
2/ It was done, IMHO, far too early in the child's life. 

I'm not a medical practitioner but I believe that if the child's blood chemistry was properly monitored it could disclose the body's natural disposition toward either gender.

If what I saw was true, as it really happened, that surgeon has some answering to do.

Wing Walker

[Prince_Eric]

That doctor is sick.

[Yvonne]

As an intersexed person myself, I threw up watching this tape.  Deplorable behaviour.  Ppl like that shouldn't be practising "medicine" anywhere in the world.