My whole life I was made to believe I was sick, when I wasn’t ‘til I grew up and blew up..." His mothers illness resulted in Eminem receiving custody of his younger brother, Nathan.In 2013, when Justina Pelletier was 14, her parents took her to the emergency room at Boston Childrens Hospital where doctors diagnosed her problems as psychiatric, but when her parents rejected the diagnosis and attempted to have her released, the hospital filed a report with Massachusetts Department of Children and Families alleging medical child abuse. This resulted in her being housed for 18 months in the psychiatric hospital, with her parents having limited access, until a judge ordered her returned to her parents. In 2016 her parents sued Boston Childrens for medical malpractice, alleging that their civil rights were violated. At the trial, Pelletiers treating neurologist stated that several of her doctors suspected factitious disorder by proxy, and wanted her parents to stop encouraging her to be sick. Her parents lost the lawsuit, with one juror stating that Pelletiers parents thought of psychiatry as "psychological baloney". Directed towards animals
Medical literature describes a subset of FDIA caregivers, where the proxy is a pet rather than another person. These cases are labeled Munchausen syndrome by proxy: pet (MSbP:P). In these cases, pet owners correspond to caregivers in traditional FDIA presentations involving human proxies. No extensive survey has yet been made of the extant literature, and there has been no speculation as to how closely FDIA:P tracks with human FDIA.
Meadow was involved as a prosecution witness in three other high-profile cases resulting in mothers being imprisoned and subsequently cleared of wrongdoing: Trupti Patel, Angela Cannings and Donna Anthony.In 2003, Lord Howe, the Opposition spokesman on health, accused Meadow of inventing a "theory without science" and refusing to produce any real evidence to prove that Munchausen syndrome by proxy actually exists. It is important to distinguish between the act of harming a child, which can be easily verified, and motive, which is much harder to verify and which FDIA tries to explain. For example, a caregiver may wish to harm a child out of malice and then attempt to conceal it as illness to avoid detection of abuse, rather than to draw attention and sympathy. The distinction is often crucial in criminal proceedings, in which the prosecutor must prove both the act and the mental element constituting a crime to establish guilt. In most legal jurisdictions, a doctor can give expert witness testimony as to whether a child was being harmed but cannot speculate regarding the motive of the caregiver. FII merely refers to the fact that illness is induced or fabricated and does not specifically limit the motives of such acts to a caregivers need for attention and/or sympathy. In all, around 250 cases resulting in conviction in which Meadow was an expert witness were reviewed, with few changes, but all where the only evidence was Meadows expert testimony were overturned.