 My name is John Leventhal, I'm a professor of pediatrics at Yale Medical School and over the last 36 years, unfortunately, I've seen hundreds of children where their concerns about abuse, neglect, or sexual abuse. In our hospital, if there's a suspicion of abuse, either I or one of my colleagues on my team gets called and our job is to help evaluate what's going on. We have to take a detailed history from the family. We have to do a very careful exam of the child, collect laboratory data, collect radiographic studies, MRIs, CTs, whatever is relevant, and then have to make a determination of whether we think abuse has occurred. Often these children are very young, less than a year or two, so they can't provide any history. And we have to rely on the information that's provided to us by the parents, maybe by child protective services when they go out to the home to investigate or the police, and then coming together to try to make a specific diagnosis. We meet weekly and review all our cases. We review them with a team of people, including social workers, doctors, sometimes child protective service people. And then we have a second review where only the physicians meet to review because we want to make sure we get this right. So I wrote the commentary piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association, also called JAMA, because I had been involved with cases of child abuse where I was very certain that the child was abused. These were often very young children. And experts were testifying for the parents or for the accused. And sometimes they came and testified about theories that had no scientific background. If these theories are believed, then someone may be found innocent when, in fact, they're guilty. And the child may be returned home in the child protection court when the child's safety may be at risk. The diagnoses were things like epilepsy or vitamin D deficiency or EDS, Herlis-Danlos syndrome. And they had never been described to result in the injuries that this child had. So how were those legitimate to explain what I was seeing and the injuries of the child? So Herlis-Danlos syndrome, also called EDS, it affects the connective tissue, which supports part of our body. So it affects the skin. It affects the joints and makes them very loose. And so people can bend their joints way out of shape or out of line. And adults, it can affect their bone strength. So it's an important disease because it has consequences to the people who are affected. It's a rare disease. Maybe there are about 60,000 people in the United States with it. And maybe about 1,000 infants would have the disease of the 4 million infants in the United States at any one time. There have been a lot of articles written about Herlis-Danlos syndrome. And there's been no description of children or infants with fractures until Dr. Halleck published one about a year ago. And in that publication, he described 72 infants, 67 of whom, he said, had Herlis-Danlos syndrome. And they were all very young, all less than 40 weeks of age. And the average age was about 2 and 1 half, three months. So very small babies. At least one of the major variants of EDS does not have a genetic test available. And so that makes it complicated to make the diagnosis. It's made on clinical grounds. And that means that one has to follow the clinical guidelines that geneticists use to make the correct diagnosis. And if we're talking about the flexibility of someone's joints, well, all babies have flexible joints. So it may be much more complicated to diagnose in an infant compared to a 10-year-old or a 25-year-old. Some of the experts who put forth theories that are questionable work at major academic institutions. And I would like to see the heads of the medical center or the dean or the president of the university take a step to do something about that. Well, it'd be nice to have some scientific background to support the unproven or fallacious hypotheses put forth. But that's not stopping people right now.