10-Year-Old with Panic (PANS)

Ms. ....... Thank you very much for bringing your son’s case and experience to our attention. First of all, I hope that Owen is still doing much better. I absolutely understand how devastating this could be in terms of a missed opportunity to appropriately diagnose. I have to say that in reading your email and updating my knowledge about the condition, I could see how it may be quite difficult to make a diagnosis accurately in an Emergency Department setting and I could see why things occurred in the manner in which they did. That said, I am very sorry that we let you and your family and your son down in this way. Our Pediatric Emergency Department are staffed by a group of very expert pediatric emergency medicine specialists trained in some of our nation’s leading teaching institutions who I was able to recruit here to ...........  to take care of our community. I know that the fact that we were not able to expeditiously diagnose your son’s condition caused a great deal of an

Message: Dear Dr. ...... In December 2015, I believed it was  December 22nd , my husband and I brought our 10-year-old son, Ewen, into the emergency room at ...... Pediatrics. We explained in triage that he was having panic attacks back to back for the past 3 hours and now he was saying that he wanted to die. Triage admitted him and then he was given a room. By the time a Dr. came in, Ewen was asleep. My husband, Mike, and I were beside ourselves with worry and shock. Ewen had always been our confident, popular kid. He was on the Gold travel soccer team, made straight A's in school and was a source of great joy in our family. He had always had an obvious love for life. He was the kid we did not have to worry about. But suddenly, late in December he had his first panic attack while playing his trumpet in a band concert. The next day I was called to pick him up from school because he didn't feel well and on the way back to the house he said he thought he had been bitten by a tara

(magnesium B6 chewable, fish oil, broccoli sprout extract, 2mg melatonin, probiotics, 250mg Zithromax, 4ml prozac) Ewen had a Dr. appt with his pediatrician this past Tuesday. I asked her if we were going to switch up the antibiotics so that Ewen doesn't build up resistance to them and she said that the current science with PANS to keep using what is working. I told her that the 500mg Zithromax was hurting his stomach a lot and so she changed it to 250mg over 2 days taken at dinner time. We are also going to bring his Prozac down to 3ml's if he does OK on the new Zithromax schedule. Mike was worried about liver damage with prolonged use of Zithromax so she said we should check Ewen's liver function every 6 months. Mike also asked about IVIG and she said that insurance won't pay for it and the nearby University hospital isn't interested in it and doesn't believe in PANS and PANDAS. Over the past few days it seems like he has been working harder than usual