Charlie Gard

No, personally I don't, but I have a great deal of sympathy for them.

There comes a point where you have to stop seeking another opinion, when every expert consultant is telling you there is no hope then it is very likely that there is no hope, these parents went well beyond that hurting themselves and possibly the child in the process.

I don't want to come up with a soundbite but this is an extreme example of what can go wrong when the notion that everyone is entitled to an opinion on any subject, whether or not they know anything about the subject, is taken to extremes.

In the modern world if you want your own views on something affirmed then you will find people somewhere, often large numbers of people, that will tell you what you want to hear.

Facebook has a lot to answer for although I don't know, in this case, if this couple were specifically encouraged to continue their fight due to support from that medium, but I reckon that because it was taken public in a big way they will have been getting a lot of support through a lot of different media which will have reaffirmed their own views and wishes, flying in the face of the experts that had a detailed picture of the situation.

Ultimately the courts have consistently agreed with the medical profession and their assessment of this child, and all appeals have been rejected.

We should ask ourselves some questions about what we expect from the health service, resources are not unlimited, can we expect every medical decision to be questioned like this in future, of course not.

Yes people can seek a second or a third opinion, you can certainly ask if there are any experimental treatments you can try to see if you can get onto a programme for experimental treatment but the answer might be no, and it might be 'no' for perfectly valid clinical reasons.

They have my sympathy, but the entire saga is just extremely sad.

The reality of the modern world is that we rarely if ever let nature decide, if we did a lot more of us would be dead.

At this point in time there are only so many things that can 'maybe' be cured, most of the common diseases have solutions but no solution is guaranteed or perfect, any operation can go awry even something simple like a tooth extraction, like it or not the medical profession does its best to maximise everyone's chances but it is exactly that 'chances' there will always be sad stories of misdiagnosis, symptoms missed and premature death because sometimes someone makes a mistake, what more can we expect the doctors and nurses are fallible human beings just like you or me.

I make professional mistakes all the time in my work, we call them bugs, I actually write these bugs, with my fingers I type them into the programs that I write, sometimes they go unnoticed for a decade or more, I solved a few very elusive bugs that were that old just a week or two ago, I am not perfect and neither is anyone else all we can do is give our best effort.

Regards this case I've not really listened to a lot about it but I did hear very early on that it was a Mitochondrial problem, now not everyone will know what Mitochondria are but I do, Mitochondria are basically a separate organism that we formed a symbiotic relationship with hundreds of millions of years ago, via the ATP/ADP cycle they essentially power our cells.

Mitochondria have their own DNA it is not part of your cellular DNA and you only get your Mitochondria from your mother they come over in the ovum, when the egg is fertilised your DNA combines with your partners DNA but not with the Mitochondria, they are totally separate and evolve at a different slower rate than human or other animal's DNA.

Mitochondria are a separate living organism inside every cell in your body and they are basically your engine, so problems with the Mitochondria are serious, your body has trillions of cells and even more Mitochondria, fixing them is not really an option because you have to gene edit multiple somethings that live in every single cell in your body and we don't have the technological means to do that, we are still in the infancy of gene editing, so when I heard what this wee lad's problem was I knew more or less immediately that the doctors were being completely open and honest about it, he didn't have a chance.

It's one of those things Andrew, the money was essentially diverted from the other things that people would have spent it on, it didn't exist as a separate entity until they set out to raise funds.

It would have been better if they had done as other families have done in the past, in similar situations, and set up a charity in memory of the wee boy, then at least the money would have helped someone other than the lawyers.

I don't want to think that but I do think that you are very likely right to some degree.

I wouldn't be quite as hard on the mother I don't think her motives were quite as shallow as that, I think she was genuinely heartbroken but just deluded into thinking that by protesting enough that reality could somehow be changed, the few cases where people with other conditions have had some success with experimental treatments would give her hope and she wouldn't want to understand the reality of what she was being told about her baby.