missed the point, dude.
yeah, the kid had problems. but you missed how his mama set him up for life. now he can go back on TV and bawl about what a VICTIM she made of him.

Curmudgeon, you saw farther into the issue than I did, and I salute the amazing cynicism of your comment. Thinking back over it, the the damage, I imagine, didn't occur when they inserted the feeding tubes or prescribed the needless medicines, but when the mother took him to the pub for their nice meal of roast beef, telling him, as Balloon Boy might have put it, that the rest “was for the show”-- making it so that he too had a stake in the pretense of disability. That must seriously skew up the reward and causality systems in the lad's brain circuitry.

This phenomenon has fascinated the media in this country for at least a decade now (I write from the UK). I don't see it as so much about the financial gain but more in terms of gains in social status arising, primarily, out of increased attention from everyone involved, from the medics to the media. Munchausen by proxy, yes, that much is well documented but I fear there is more to it than that and that in many of the cases which receive media attention the behavior of the parents is exacerbated, if not brought about, by two factors: the cult of 'celebrity' and the popularity of hospital based TV shows, which occupy half of prime time here. These facilitate the ability of the M by P sufferers to mislead the medics while at the same time drawing the gaze of the people toward their actions. I say 'sufferers' deliberately as M by P, as with so much abuse, is often passed on by those who have themselves been abused. I don't share the cynicism expressed above, in some cases the parent does not appear to be aware of what they are doing.

“Increased attention from everyone involved, from the medics to the media” means that even the prosecution of such people may gratify their yearning for fame. This gets to be a worse nut the more I worry it. (And though we are only three discussants so far, I guess we are helping the problem to snowball...)

Yes, if I  understand you correctly. Prosecutions are often accompanied by media feeding frenzies which are often followed by protracted investigation in order to apportion 'blame' to whichever government or law enforcement agency “let this happen.” After a while related storylines will appear in soap operas of which we are particularly fond; the producers of such shows claim that by so doing they are serving to bring problems which otherwise might not be discussed or are of topical interest into the ambit of the common man. This results in “the common man” (what man is 'common'?) being led to believe that such abhorrencies are, in effect, far more widespread and frequent than they originally were, with the resultant persistent expectation of fear and, for a few, to emulatory impulses (normative? I don't have the language). Tragedy is magnified and the lenses are arranged so that the magnification is amplified with each pass until the tragedy is hidden beneath layers of increasingly distorted versions of itself: only when these are carefully scraped off is the palimpsest of the real tragedy exposed. Add 'reality' television which bears no relation to reality whatsoever. Add the fact that TV is an addictive [in]activity and that through co-option of the peripheral vision attention fixing systems of the brain, manipulation of which is as deliberate as understanding allows it to be and, yes, one finds a pretty unpleasant rut. Probably making little sense!

Oops. “, we are forced to attend to it” after 'be' in penultimate sentence!

The Munchausen mother is a parody of solicitude-- exaggerated, as parodies tend to be. The condemnation of her actions on TV delivers fame and, thus, perversely, the very gratification sought: another parody. We have here a classic feedback escalation.