by Mark Flatten, Goldwater Institute
How do you tell a 7-year-old child she must go back on a feeding tube? Cassie Le is facing that terrible question.
Her daughter spent the first seven months of her life unable to eat without vomiting. The doctors ran the usual tests and tried the usual medications. Nothing worked.
The girl was put on a feeding tube when she was 7 months old. It helped some, but she continued to be sick regularly.
Finally, doctors tried domperidone, a medication routinely used by millions of people throughout the world to treat gastric conditions like those afflicting Le’s daughter. It worked. The feeding tube was removed about four years ago, and since then the girl has been able to eat normally.
That is coming to an end because of new rules restricting the availability of domperidone imposed by the federal Food and Drug Administration, which never approved its use in the United States. So people like Le’s daughter can no longer legally get it.
“I fear she will need to get a feeding tube placed back in,” Le says. “How do I tell her that? How would you as a parent tell your child … ‘sorry the medicine that has helped you to eat and enjoy eating is no longer available so now you can’t eat … you will get fed to your intestine by a feeding tube.’ She is a little girl who has worked extremely hard to overcome her fears of eating and now her joy of being a normal little girl will be taken away.”
Learn more about how federal red tape is blocking access to this potentially life-saving treatment for Cassie Le and thousands of other Americans in a new investigative report by the Goldwater Institute, Sickening: FDA Bureaucracy Blocks Common “Miracle Drug.” Please click here to read the full report.
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