Dr. Diekema’s comment on genetic testing

 

The Seattle Children’s Hospital Treuman Katz Center for Pediatric Bioethics is convening its fourth pediatric bioethics conference today and tomorrow. The conference theme this year is genetic testing in children. The real time live webcast is available on the site linked above.

 

Yesterday, Paul Nyhan of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who was going to cover it wrote a post Do you want to know every disease your kid might get? in the newspaper blog and asked for readers’ opinion on genetic testing in children. I found Dr. Diekema’s comment quoted in this post quite interesting.

 

A “core piece of advice is you shouldn’t do genetic testing just because it’s available. …….Parents need to think about how useful a test would be…..If there’s a test (that) came back positive, what would be the benefit for my child? Is there something we could do?

 

Doesn’t this contradict his own reasoning in the Ashley case? According to Dr. Diekema, mastectomy was to Ashley’s benefit, even without a genetic test, because there were breast diseases in her family. With a positive test result, there should be definitely something parents could do for their children. Just surgically remove the organ in question. It would be totally ethically appropriate, because it would be to the benefit for the child. Wouldn’t it, Dr. Diekema?