[id: screenshots of a news article from iNews (published 16 May 2024)
Title: ‘It’s destroyed us’: Parents of children with long Covid accused of making it up
Doctors and parents say children are being threatened with being taken into care as medics struggle to diagnose their conditions and families are placed under suspicion
Parents of children with long Covid claim they have been accused of faking or exaggerating their child’s illness, leading to social services’ involvement and, in some instances, court cases and the threat of the child’s removal from the home.
Doctors struggle to diagnose the condition due to its complex range of symptoms and often treat it as a psychological rather than physical disease, with parents telling i they have been accused of Chile abuse and of fabricating the illness as a result.
One in five parents of children with ME are referred to social services, according to Tymes Trust, an ME charity. Families and doctors warn this is now increasingly occurring with long Covid.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics show an estimated 62,000 children aged two to 16 years have reported suffering from long COVID.
Ruby was diagnosed with functional neurological disorder (FND), previously known as hysteria, and her family was reported to social services under suspicion of FII.
“[The local consultant] said: ‘This child is in danger, we need to get her out of the home,’ and that we were harming our Ruby and wanted her to be disabled,” says Ms Rowley, 46. “When she kept saying she was in pain, they said, ‘You’re not in pain, you don’t need pain relief.’”
Dr Speight has been assisting families with ME—and now long Covid— pro bono for three decades. He says he’s seen some 2000 patients in that time, 200 in “real difficulty” where specialized practitioners have stepped in to stop children being separated from their families.
Dr Kane warns that long Covid provisions are set to worsen as the existing Government-funded long Covid clinics are being scaled back and become “optional” for NHS trusts.
