Last week, desperate parents Brett and Naghmeh King were thrown into prison after smuggling their critically ill five-year-old son Ashya out of hospital after a row with doctors over treatment for his deadly brain tumour.

The couple feared the combination of aggressive chemotherapy and radiotherapy planned by medics at Southampton General Hospital would "kill him or turn him into a vegetable."

UK CHARITY TO FUND ASHYA KING'S CANCER TREATMENT FOLLOWING PARENTS' RELEASE

Instead, they wanted their son, who was hooked up to a feeding tube and given four months to live, to have pioneering proton beam therapy that isn't widely available on the NHS. It's a form of radiotherapy that aims to reduce the damage to healthy brain tissue and side effects.

The determined parents sparked an international manhunt when they fled with him to spain to sell their house to pay for the costly treatment.

But just days after leaving the UK, they were jailed after being charged with child cruelty.

After being held for three days in a cell, the charges were dropped.

SPANISH COURT RELEASES PARENTS OF SERIOUSLY ILL ASHYA KING

One mum who understands the desperate plight of the King family is mum-of-two Roz Barnes, who also went against medical advice when her son Alex was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2007, aged three.

She says: "Reading about Ashya brought it all back. It's appalling how they've been treated. I'd have done anything to help my son. Like Ashya's parents I fled the NHS to go to America fro proton therapy. Radiotherapy would have given Alex a 20 per cent chance of survival, but left him brain damaged and in a wheelchair.

"US doctors told me they could treat him without the side effects- it was costly but I didn't care. I'd have gone to jail if anyone stood in the way of helping my son."

To read more of Roz's story, buy Closer magazine, out now.