Amazing how a bit of a public outcry changes things......

The parents of Ashya King have been allowed to leave prison - BBC article

It beggars belief how this whole situation was allowed to escalate the way it did in the first place to be honest - if ever there was a case of jobsworths pushing their boundaries too far, this has to be it, and all involved in vilifying these parents should be sacked.

The other thing that I simply don't understand is why the treatment that they are seeking could not have been done here in the UK; I read an article the other day that mentioned that it is used in the UK, but only for cancers/tumours related to the eye - - yet apparently it will be more widely available by 2018.

One can therefore only assume that its financial constraints that are stopping this treatment being tried in this case....... so, we can't afford to treat a young child at the start of his life, but we can afford an international witch-hunt? We can afford gender-reassignment and plastic surgery such as breast augmentations, but we can't afford to treat life threatening conditions such as cancer, fully and properly?

This world really disgusts me sometimes.

 

Fair enough, but surely they didn't have to go for a full-on arrest warrant? Could they not have asked the Spanish authorities to interview and liaise with the family, but still leave them in touch with the wee lad?

Agreed, loads of money wasted, and very tight budgets - yet there is money in the kitty to put boobs on a bloke? I know its very un-PC of me, but surely the NHS should be there almost solely for life-threatening diseases and illnesses? I'm not for one second saying that people shouldn't be allowed gender re-assignment or plastic surgery - but why should it be free? Especially when we have people dying with conditions that we supposedly cannot afford to treat?

 

Did they snatch him though Sheal? Or was it more a case where they had researched and found the treatment, asked about availability, to then go on and state their intentions to pursue that treatment elsewhere only to be told that they would be doing so against (UK) medical advice and as such the hospital would not discharge the wee fella, leaving them with little option but to spring him out of hospital and head off to get the treatment they believe will work.

To be honest, the hospital doesn't really have much credibility left in this one, so their assertion that the child was 'taken' doesn't really hold much water with me; 'taken' could well translate to 'well, we couldn't provide the treatment so we can't recommend it, therefore pursuing it would be against our medical advice' . Their silence speaks volumes really.

However, they were still right to flag this up to the police - it was the portrayal that was wrong, with the immediate emphasis being on the religious beliefs of the family. For the record, I am not religious in the least, but having very recently worked on a large contract for Jehovah's Witnesses, the one thing I can say is that almost without exception I found them to be the friendliest, polite and level-headed people that I have had the pleasure of working with. Whilst their beliefs may not sit well with our own, or our medical and social care systems, that does not instantaneously make them bad people/parents?

The over-riding thing here is the wee boy - gravely ill, taken abroad by his family to get 'special/magic' treatment to make him better, then almost immediately ripped away from his family and kept away by people that speak in a funny accent. Poor wee thing must have been scared witless, and all because a handful of people in the UK decided that his own parents were putting him in danger, without any real evidence to support their theory.

Honestly, if it were Mrs C or Little C that was in hospital in a similar situation and I knew that there was something I could do to heal them, I would do it - even if it meant me knowingly falling foul of protocols; if that makes me a bad person, then I truly fear for this world.

All in all, how much money has been spent on this whole debacle, and how many people could get proton beam treatment in this country for that same amount of cash? We really are brilliant at cutting our nose off to spite our faces in this country.