Physical or laboratory findings that are highly unusual, discrepant with history, or physically or clinically impossible.

A parent, usually the mother, who appears to be medically knowledgeable and/or fascinated with medical details and hospital gossip, appears to enjoy the hospital environment, and expresses interest in the details of other patients’ problems.

A highly attentive parent who is reluctant to leave her child’s side and who herself seems to require constant attention.

A parent who appears to be unusually calm in the face of serious difficulties in her child’s medical course while being highly supportive and encouraging of the physician, or one who is angry, devalues staff, and demands further intervention, more procedures, second opinions, and transfers to other more sophisticated facilities.

The suspected parent may work in the health care field herself or profess interest in a health-related job.

A family history of similar sibling illness or unexplained sibling illness or death.

A parent with symptoms similar to her child’s own medical problems or an illness history that itself is puzzling and unusual.

A suspected parent with an emotionally distant relationship with her spouse; the spouse often fails to visit the patient and has little contact with physicians even when the child is hospitalized with serious illness.

A parent who reports dramatic, negative events, such as house fires, burglaries, car accidents, that affect her and her family while her child is undergoing treatment.

A parent who seems to have an insatiable need for adulation or who makes self-serving efforts at public acknowledgement of her abilities.

For More Information:

• Common Presentations of MSP and the Usual Methods of Deception

• Repeated hospitalizations and extensive medical tests that fail to produce a diagnosis

• Symptoms that do not make medical sense

• Persistent failure of the victim to respond to therapy

• Signs and symptoms that dissipate when the victim is removed from the suspected offender's presence

• Mothers who do not seem worried about their child's illness, but are constantly at the child's side while in the hospital

• Mothers who have an unusually close relationship with the hospital's medical staff

• A family history of sudden infant death syndrome

• Mothers with previous medical or health-care experience who have a history of the same type of illness as their child

• A parent who welcomes medical testing of the child, even if painful

• Attempts to convince the staff that the child is still ill, when advised that the child will be released from the hospital

• A model family that normally would be above suspicion

• A caregiver with a previous history of Munchausen's Syndrome

• A caregiver who adamantly refuses to accept the suggestion that the diagnosis is nonmedical