The Ashley Treatment is in the news again. The procedure, by which doctors attempted to keep a severely disabled girl small by, among other things, administering hormones and giving her a hysterectomy, has been widely debated over the past six months after her doctors publicized the procedure and her parents responded to critics with a site of their own.
There may still be disagreement over whether the procedure is ethical or not, but apparently one thing it wasn't is legal in the state of Washington. According to a CNN report, the Washington Protection and Advocacy System investigated the treatment done on young Ashley and concluded that it violated a state law forbidding the sterilizaton of a developmentally disabled child without a court order.
Seattle Children's Hospital did not get such an order, relying on the word of the family's lawyers that it was not needed. Hospital officials have apologized and said that they will get such orders before administering the treatment to other children.
One thing that struck me as odd about the CNN story: It mentioned that Ashley's diagnosis is static encephalopathy, defined here as "an unchanging brain injury of unknown origin." That's the diagnosis my daughter has, and it's also commonly used to describe the brain damage of children like my son. That's one heck of a broad diagnosis if it encompasses both my language-, learning- and behavior-challenged but basically functional kids and a child described as a "pillow angel" and a "baby in a much larger body." Anybody else have experience with this diagnosis?
My understanding is “static encephalopathy” is a huge catch all for brain injury. My son has cerebral palsy (another catch all – he has spastic quadriplegia), aka static encephalopathy.
I’m delighted that WPAS came out with such a strong report, both in terms of the fact that the surgery was illegal *and* that this treatment is discriminatory.