When paediatricians and families cant agree

Recent high-profile cases have highlighted the difficulties that professionals caring for terminally ill or technology dependent children face.

I am a paediatrician. I see children with severe problems, often chronic and frequently without a cure, and I try as far as possible to help them and their families. Occasionally there is science and evidence behind the decisions we make, but not always. Medicine does have its black and white disciplines—it is either cancer or it isn’t; or you either need to have an operation or you don’t. But paediatrics is often a discipline of uncertainty dealing with many shades of grey.

Paediatricians learn to live with uncertainty and similarly have to support parents and young people to accept this uncertainty. Sometimes we have to wait for nature to reveal itself or for the future to unfold as it should. Herein lies the art of paediatrics: the ability to watch...

from Archives of Disease in Childhood current issue https://ift.tt/2qJ5i6t