Cerebral Palsy

Dr.

Öner Odabaş, who heads the ministry’s treatment services department, announced late on Friday that the Evren family’s plea to allow a doctor to apply a growth-stunting procedure to their disabled son had been rejected by the department’s ethics committee, which is made up of a child neurologist, a radiologist, a deontologist, public health officials, a child psychiatrist, a child endocrinologist, a surgeon, and representatives of the Turkish Pharmacists’ Union and the Turkish Doctors’ Union.

“There has been no documentation of the positive consequences of this method in the literature to date,” said Odabaş.The Evren family had applied to the Ankara University department of medicine late March, where they were told they would have to wait for a decision from the Health Ministry’s ethics committee before implementing the procedure to stunt their child’s growth, also referred to as “Ashley’s treatment.” The family had said they feared that if their disabled son Umut Mert got taller and heavier, they would be unable to hold or carry him.

Umut Mert cannot eat, speak or walk by himself.

Explaining the ethics committee decision, Odabaş said Ashley’s treatment was currently applied only in the US, stating that the number of cases where the growth-stunting procedure had been used was still too...

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