11 year old girl who discontinued chemotherapy for alternative medicine dies

[Bring_Back_Shantz]

Originally Posted by calgarygeologist

I agree with you that children do need protection in some cases when parents shows neglect or can not care and provide for a child.

I do not agree that parent`s rights to make decisions for their families and children should be taken away because they don`t necessarily agree with a proposed method of treatment. We don`t need government to be stepping in and making decisions on every single case or every single matter.

There is a somewhat related flip side to this discussion and that is with regards to the government not providing care or treatment for sick kids. There have been recent cases in Canada where various treatments or drugs are not provided by the health care program which could save lives but the government won`t step up to the plate to support the families and take care of the costs. Why should the government be deciding who lives and who dies?

The parents choice was not between two differnet methods of treatment. They didn't disagree with a propsoed method of treatment.

Their choice was between treatment and no treatment.
They disagreed with any treatment. Full stop!

Their choice was between a conventional treatment recomended by a qualifed team of doctors, who assessed the chances of success to be 75%, and a 100% certainty of death.

Part of being a parent is providing the necessities of life, in this case that would have been treatment. They purposely withheld that treatment, and as a result their daughter died.

[CaptainCrunch]

Lets be honest, this is less about a girl and a family that wanted to not undergo actual treatment and undergo some kind of native traditional treatment and more about a family being conned by a natural medicine shell game perpetrated by a center run by people that aren't qualified to mow my lawn let alone treat a disease like cancer.

When your treatment for a treatable cancer is to give massages and make people eat wheat grass while sitting around in a circle and chanting "I will be cured", frankly your going to die.

Just taking a quick look the cost at that center is $18,000 dollars and up. If anything we should be furious that the center exists in the first place. Its run by a quack who doesn't have any kind of formal medical training whatsoever.

Putting the decision in this childs hands or the parents hands is a terrible thing because watching any kind of family member going through something like Chemo is a horrible and emotional thing and nobody wants to see their child suffer, which they do under chemo is awful. But when a quack sells them on their child not suffering from treatment while they get a massage and eat some straw and getting miraculously healed is a road that a lot of maybe uneducated people will follow.

This isn't as much about the whole "We want our daughter to be treated in a Native American Way by our traditions" and more about "This Chemo is beating the crap out of out kid and puts her in pain, and we want her not to suffer and look this quack guarantees results with no suffering".

The argument is that these so called naturalpathy companies and institutes are not held to any standard whatsoever and they are no better then religious faith healers who promise that if they punch you in the face Christ will remove those demon cataracts from their eyes.

There's plenty of failure to go around. Child Services and the doctors probably could have fought harder. The parents were a bit stupid and blinded by emotion. The child as being a child. But my ire goes to the institute that sucks people in, takes their money and promises results that are in no way possible.

You can't cure cancer with positive thoughts, relaxation therapy and wacky diets and snake oil. Cancer has to be treated aggressively, and killed before it spreads. Its a disease that more then a lot of others works on a vicious and aggressive calender.

The governments in both North American Countries needs to start forcing standards and requirements of proof on natural medicine companies and insititutes. That's where this cautionary tail needs to start.

[Thor]

We give way too much leeway to "natural" and "supplement" laws, its time we held places like this accountable for claims they make to their customers, and require evidence before you promote a product for a specific claim.