False accusations

False accusations of abuse may be made towards people living with someone who has OI. This causes a lot of unnecessary stress on families, and is often hard to prove unless there is documentation of a person having the OI.

False accusations of child abuse or spousal abuse may occur in families with children who have milder forms of OI and/or in whom OI has not previously been diagnosed. Types of fractures that are typically observed in both child and domestic abuse and OI include:

fractures in multiple stages of healing

rib fractures

spiral fractures

fractures for which there is no adequate explanation of trauma

Often there is no explanation for breaks/fractures that someone uneducated with OI would believe. That’s because a person with OI gets hurt easier then others, often by no apparent cause.

Another common accusation of people with OI is that they are drug addicts, addicted to pain relievers. That’s because they are often hurt and can not always deal with or ignore the pain on their own. So they visit a doctor or ER more often then others, to see whether a bone is really broken or not, and to get relief for the pain.

Someone uneducated with OI may not know what to look for or may just jump to the assumption on their own. Many times the bones are not as dense as someone without OI bones would be, so that small fractures or breaks do not show up on the X-ray machines. It is also common for people with OI to suffer from back pain, yet another thing that drug addicts often complain of.

Even in the medical field most do not know anything about OI, it’s so rare that it’s not required to be taught in the medical books to get your degree. At least not by nurses and nurses are the ones that you deal with the most.

So it is possible for someone uneducated about OI to mistake a normal occurrence that an OI person has for abuse or someone seeking drugs because of an addiction. Most people are not educated about OI, and a large majority has never even heard of it.

These assumptions cause unnecessary stress on people living with OI and their families, and often have unpleasant results like bones healing improperly or children being taken away. Please take the time today to learn about OI and relies that the saying about what happens when you assume is true.