By Mark Flatten, national investigative journalist for the Goldwater Institute
How do you tell a 7-year-old child she are facing the inevitable reality that we will not 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 vomiting regularly.
“Feeding became something she feared,” Le of Texas said in a May 2016 email describing her daughter’s condition.
Finally, doctors tried domperidone, a medication widely used 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 U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
