A controversial diagnosis is increasingly accepted among doctors. Finding care remains out of reach for many families.
When Angela Tang’s teenage son came down with a baffling illness, few households could have been better equipped to deal with it. The family lives in a wealthy Los Angeles suburb. Both parents are doctors — Tang in internal medicine, her husband in infectious disease — and their son, a straight-A student well-liked at school, had been cared for by the family’s pediatrician since birth.
Still, the parents worried as their son’s symptoms appeared, seemingly out of the blue, in September 2018: He’d meticulously line up pencils in groups of five, recite prayers unrelentingly, make homework illegible as he had to erase or cross out every C, D, and F.
Gabriella True
