Munchausen’s by Proxy

Most likely due to the publicity surrounding the new netflix series “the act” I have been looking into Munchausens by proxy.


Munchausen’s by proxy is when a caregiver intentionally makes their charge sick or undergo unnecessary medical procedures, usually for financial or emotional gain..


Apparently there are a couple cases where this was done without a noticeable gain..



Well somehow this is considered a psychological condition rather than just a criminal act.. don’t get me wrong it is still illegal to abuse your child regardless of your mental condition, but still..


I can see how maybe the rare cases where no gain was to be had could be considered a mental disorder.. , but the cases where it was perpetrated to make the mother money or a national/local attention that isn’t a mental illness....


It would be the difference between a regular “for gain “ thief and someone with legit cleptomania.. where they are stealing valueless items on impulse.


Something else I have noticed is that this is a woman’s crime.. and apparently an unattractive, overweight woman’s crime..

That isn’t me pointing fingers at women.. rape and young child molestation is almost always a male crime.

But you have to think that is relevant.. who gets less attention in our society than unattractive and morbidly obese women.. and these “mothers” almost always become local celebrities who get crazy amounts of attention and donations.


No one..

It is just so shocking and imho worse than your run of the mill child abusers..


Would you rather be hit or chopped up with surgeries.. and filled with pharmaceuticals you do not need...

something else worth mentioning is that these women almost never face a real penalty..

a reply to: JustJohnny

I wasn't sure about this...

but the cases where it was perpetrated to make the mother money or a national/local attention that isn’t a mental illness....

Until you put it this way...

It would be the difference between a regular “for gain “ thief and someone with legit cleptomania.. where they are stealing valueless items on impulse.

That's an apt comparison.

As to whether I'd rather have been beat by my mother, or sliced & diced in surgery... Yikes. I can't answer that. On this, Mother's Day, I have to choose my mother's loving embrace. Bless the children in this world who never get to feel unconditional love. It hurts my soul.

Also, never really thought about the condition being a woman's "disease/crime" before. But I've for sure never heard of a man inflicting this particular kind of sinister abuse on a child.

Your thread brings to mind this song...

a reply to: new_here

I was unaware that apparently there is no recorded case of a female molesting a young child, unless that person was already severely mentally deficient.


Women will molest young teens, but apparently a woman molesting an infant for example is basically unheard of.

I have known people who have plead illness or even say they got hurt at work just to get out of work. They went to the doctors and the doctors were glad to take the money and write them a slip to get off of work. Some of these collected Aflac so they did get paid. Others filed for workers comp when they were not really hurt enough to be off work.

The health care industry likes cash cows, they will stick as many into expensive tests and programs as they can these days. Often it costs the patient or parent of the patient lots of copay....for nothing, the Healthcare industry here seems to put logs on the fire of people's delusional worries these days, often the problem is only temporary, going away in a couple of weeks on it's own, a fluke in metabolics caused by something. I try to inform people what they are doing wrong, but they think they need medicines to fix the problem, often either eliminating something from the diet or altering the way you prepare it takes care of the problem. Deficiencies take a while to happen, you have to run the body stores of something out before there are symptoms. Treating the symptoms is not the same as fixing the problem most times, doctors treat symptoms, they do not have time to do the research to fix the problem.

Half of our country has been misled by people who tell them to change their diet, incorporating foods that their ancestors never ate, foods they have not yet gained the ability to metabolize correctly.

a reply to: JustJohnny

The desire for attention is not only about local celebrity status. It can be about attracting attention from 'important' people, doctors. In either case, it is the desire or need to feel special,

Deliberately causing illness in a child, or reporting the child as having mental health issues is a twisting of normal maternalism. The mother convinces herself and believes she is getting help for the child. My mother suffered this condition. She selected her least favourite two children and was relentless in her pursuit of medical attention. The first child (me) suffered unknown (I don't want to know if there were more than the two attempts I remember) murder attempts. She told the doctor the second child had severe behavioural problems. Psych reports that he was a normal little boy as recorded in his medical records that he was able to retrieve as an adult. The doctor assessed the situation as the problem being mental issues in the mother but at the time, Munchhausen's by proxy was unheard of and no action was taken.

When she could not get whatever it was she wanted from the doctors, she attempted creating legal case after legal case, all to get attention from another group of 'important' people, lawyers. This continued until one lawyer sent my father a massive bill and wrote to them as a couple threatening legal action if she did not desist from harassing him.

At that point, my mother developed Munchausen's non-proxy and began to invent illnesses for herself. She ended up agoraphobic and a virtual prisoner in her home. She did go out and remained sociable but with all the whinging to the doctor, was drugged up on tramadol for the last two decades of her life.

I think she was damaged as a child and this caused her poor mental health. Her own mother had too strong a work ethic to be emotionally available and when she was, all attention went to her favourite child who was not my mother.

My parents then buried a child - an experience I have not been cursed with so I cannot begin to understand what they went through but I think in my mother's case, this loss was the last straw, pushed her over the edge.

My father's way was to chug along until he lost it. That often meant violence, directed either at his wife or toward any miscreant child in the vicinity (any transgression could be punishable by a beating, we were not beaten for nothing).

Having said all that, childhood was not entirely unhappy. As a couple they were party people, there was an extended family close by and we had a lot of freedom to do as we wanted.

For many years, I hated my mother and I regret that. I do not blame myself anymore for anything that was done to me but only because I grew up, owned my pain and pushed on through but I did cut her out of my life, without regret and sometimes I still hold the useless wish she'd had sufficient intelligence and presence of mind to admit those incidents and the grief she caused to her family.

The two children not singled out for such harsh treatment also suffered but in more intrinsic ways, nothing overt. They came to see themselves as superior to their siblings and from there, to everyone else. It created in them a mental attitude that brought them much loss that I am sure they never came to understand.

I feel for my mother now. She buried two children, one as a young mum and another after she had retired but maybe that empathy is only because she is dead. I do not feel for my father. He too buried those children but had he not been what he was, things may have been different for us all.

a reply to: rickymouse

Not at all.. multiple healthcare professionals reported that they were pretty sure the mother was faking it.. the system failed, but because the mother knew how to fake it..

This list doesn’t only apply to the gypsy rose case..


1) all perpetrators with have medical schooling or use the net to research the illnesses they are faking..

This case the mother even had a nursing degree..


2) they Dr. shop and are super calculating to fool them..

3) all dr.s rely on the parents to be accurate historians..

originally posted by: JustJohnny
a reply to: rickymouse

Not at all.. multiple healthcare professionals reported that they were pretty sure the mother was faking it.. the system failed, but because the mother knew how to fake it..

This list doesn’t only apply to the gypsy rose case..


1) all perpetrators with have medical schooling or use the net to research the illnesses they are faking..

This case the mother even had a nursing degree..


2) they Dr. shop and are super calculating to fool them..

3) all dr.s rely on the parents to be accurate historians..

Some people do research things to find some disease they might have then they create extra symptoms to match the disease. That is not uncommon, I know people who do. The thing is that people do not understand that a lot of diseases share symptoms, a lot of deficiencies can lead to diseases, and also if you eat food you can not metabolize properly because of inadequate amounts of enzymes, you can cause a disease to perpetuate.

Many medicines adjust enzymes, I have studied many of those. I do have a shortage of some enzymes which I discovered because of serious side effects of meds I was taking long term. I had an inkling, but nothing substantual. So I started researching and found that adjusting my diet could keep the symptoms at bay, I also got my genetics done and loaded the info into a gene app and verified what the problem was. The thing is genetics alone is not a good diagnosis. It is hard to properly identify things because often the people do not eat the foods that trigger the problem from inadequate enzymes. I feel that our nutrition experts are going to make more people sick than they will help by telling them to eat more of some foods.

I have like fifteen reds in my methylation cycle, what does that mean? I cannot eat a lot of foods containing nitrogen compounds because nitrates cause methyl to turn to ammonia in the blood. It is a genetic trait, far northern Europeans have evolved through ancestral diet to not squander nitrates, they did not have access to green veggies year round so conserve and store them more, which can cause metabolic issues if they eat too much. Same goes for hot sauce, it cancels out the methylation, good for overmethylators, but bad for undermethylators.

I have a lot of gene corrections though, so If you crave something you eat it and when you do not crave it, you don't eat it. I lost my automatic with the epilepsy, so now I am forced to learn it. On top of that, age plays a factor in enzymes, so diet has to be relearned in the three to four metabolic turning points, I cannot eat what I did when younger, and I cannot eat what I used to eat when I worked hard and sweat everything out. I could eat more variety if I actually took a sauna a few times a week, like my ancestors did. My grandfather was out picking strawberries and potatoes in the fields till he was eighty six, then after never ever going to a doctor, he died in his sleep one night. He could carry around bushel bags of potatoes for hours. But he liked the sauna and liked sweating in the fields.

I have tachychardia, am hypovolemic, need lots of salt, and tend to suffer often from Hypoglycemia, that is one condition and I inherited it from my fathers side of the family. Which is the actual problem, since they are all found in Tachychardia I feel they are part of that. I do get very low blood pressure issues occasionally, way more than just shakes now from the reactive hypoglycemic episodes, I get orthostatic hypotension which I can stem just by quickly drinking a glass of water if I get it in time. It is all related to the problem that I have always peed a lot, I will pee out five cups of coffee when I drink three. Same used to happen when I used to drink, and I got the headspins many nights when drinking, never knew why, I assumed it was normal for people to not be able to get out of bed like that, it is not normal, it is hypovolemia.

So what do I do, I carry around water or a mountain dew when I do stuff, it stops it. My doctor listens and said I should eat more salt, it does no good, I just pee out more salt. I could eat sugar I suppose, that makes me retain the salt if appears, it does for everyone I guess, working in the kidneys somehow. But I never have liked a lot of sugar, probably because two hours later I crash, once I start eating it I have to keep eating it till I go sleep. Eating is a waste of productive time, I used to eat only one meal a day, supper, and carried nuts with me or reeses peanut butter cups for the majority of my life.

Do I need a doctor to verify this again, no, my tachychardia is well noted in all my records, so is my hypoglycemia. My low sodium shows up sometimes, at the bottom of the normal range in my blood even when I doon't fast, I checked the records I had collected, also some of the properties of the meds they gave me were sodium channel blockers, those were the worst ones, I could not even get off the couch.

I just had the time to put all of this together, and that meant I had to test things on myself to see if it was pertinent. According to my DNA gensets, I probably make way too much diuretic Hormone, I would rather find the way to naturally control it, I am listed on my medical records as intolerant to diuretic hormones, the doctor marked it down years ago before I even knew about this stuff, She would not give me a refill, my edema probably came from low sodium.

All just inconveniences, The only one I think is more than an inconvenience is my epilepsy. But because of my genetics, I can control the epilepsy with diet, It is the same reason I was extremely intolerant to the meds to treat it, I lack adequate enzymes to detox the meds and the foods that the medicine origination is based off of. Scientists did not blindly create drugs, they observed how foods effected people and researched the food chemistry to find how they helped. I hack pharmaceutical science quite a bit and read lots of research.

The problem is that I cannot experience the results of how foods can effect some people who have different enzymes than I do, I cannot even fathom what an overmethylator would feel like for sure. I have a lot of my relatives genetic data to work with, some have less methylation inhibition than I do, so I observe their behavior. Trouble is, my daughters kids have a father who is hispanic, actually from guatamala, his genetics is way different, their kids do not have all the protective genes I or my daughter have, I do not know how to evaluate it, they will just need to learn how to eat on their own I guess, side effects of diet get way worse when genetics are far off.

From what I've had to live with. Woman with that affliction is more seeking attention for attentions sake. I live with a woman who dragged my half brother through hell all for attention. "My son has this and that." To her friends and family. While he had none of those. It's a terrible thing that I've come to notice more and more. So many children who's lives are ruined with physical and mental illnesses that they don't have. And a lot of doctors more then willing give them what they want for that paycheck. It's gross.

Now her and my dad are separated. We have the kiddos and he's doing better but still has a long way to go. The pills she put him on changed his brain for the worst and I hope he's able to heal from it and become a normal kid again.

She was also very obese and from those I see it from. Unattractive to say the least. It's not their outward looks that make them that way. It's other traits. Lying is a big one. They will lie for lies sake. They will do whatever they can to make sure you see it the way they do. At first you agree with them. Until their lies become overwhelming and then they start to contradict themselves. When that happens your first thought of it is right and one should turn their backs to them.

There are so many children in low income homes that are being used in this way. Free healthcare for them doesn't help. It's used way to much. It's a illness we need to start getting a grip on because it is spreading.