Neglect of modern medicine

[Artsysiridean]

I put this here because I don't quite now where to put this.

This is one of those very real/fabled cases of a relative or more refusing to seek medical help of another in the favor of a strong belief (there -are- other things that fall under this umbrella other then religon), which began Monday of this week (18th). In summary the tale begins with the parents of Daniel Hauser refusing to let their son undergo chemotherapy over the course of four months after being diagnosed with cancer. After the law got involved Daniel's mother, Colleen, took Daniel and seem to be on the run. [Article can be found here]

And then we have [this] asshole. (Always loved that line). I'm not a fan of chemotherapy, but I'm even less of a fan of disinformation.

 

[Brunks]

would be very sad if the kid didn't make it because they got to him too late.
chemo works, it might not be the healthiest thing, but it beats dying.

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

I think we should put a shame sectio on his forum and colect the many difrent cases where belief in the irrational can get people killed.

 

[Artsysiridean]

I think we should put a shame sectio on his forum and colect the many difrent cases where belief in the irrational can get people killed.

Darwin Awards section? If that'd happen that'd be the only reason I'd come.

Really, though. I can only think of one alternative to chemotherapy that works and she's definitely not doing it, it seems.

 

[ebbixx]

Darwin Awards section? If that'd happen that'd be the only reason I'd come.

Really, though. I can only think of one alternative to chemotherapy that works and she's definitely not doing it, it seems.

Disclaimer: I don't know the full details of this case, or what the kid's prognosis is, but, there are two things that deeply concern me here. Even though the article presenting the story does raise issues about the child's competence, and the family's religious beliefs, I think my concerns still stand, in part because we have this odd situation in the US, where the state can mandate allopathic treatment, especially for a child, while providing none of the material support to pay the costs. I have a feeling that the facts may have been presented in a biased way here, and also that the "religious grounds" the family may be claiming might be partly a response to the material realities of the situation they are experiencing.

My first concern would be, it's suggested here that the child has already undergone chemo and experienced its effects... this doesn't seem to be a case strictly limited to personal belief or lack of judgment. Does a patient have a right to make his/her own decisions about treatment, or not? To what extent should prejudices about mental competence be a factor, or allow a court to override a patient's wishes and judgements? If the child is mentally incapacitated to the degree that he cannot comprehend the presumed medical situation, but he IS competent to fully experience the pain associated with the treatment, isn't the treatment itself, perhaps, a form of torture, albeit, one that is socially condoned by the majority's acceptance of allopathic medicine as the only valid kind of medicine?

I realize this situation is clouded a bit by the vagaries of US law that mean, in effect, that minors do no have the same range of choices as adults, and that the state can order things "in the child's best interest" and override the will and reason of both the child and the child's parents.

I find this fascinating and more than a little scary.

The second issue for me is a discomfort with having someone with no medical training (a judge) empowered to make medical decisions for a third party, and someone he/she has very little obligation to or connection with except in having been shanghai'd into making a decision of this sort. Is his ego being served by accepting this responsibility despite no formal training in medicine or biology?

Having been through some medical treatments that doctors and allied heathcare providers imagined would be beneficial, only to find that they turned out to be very harmful, I must admit I have a bias here.

In my case, the harm was not intentional. It came because the patient (myself) was far more sensitive -- mainly in toxic ways rather than ways offering a benefit vis a vis the condition being treated -- to the drugs prescribed than statistical studies would suggest that a patient "should" be. The docs presumed the treatment was useful, based mainly on statistical dosage studies -- right for the majority, deadly wrong for me.

As a result of this experience, perhaps I'm just overly sensitized to the notion that often times the patient is the one the treatment pros should be listening to, even if the patient may be in some way incapacitated. But most good doctors realize this is the case, and it's why they at least try to listen to patients. And some of the toxicity was no doubt partly "my fault" because I accepted their assumptions far more than I should have, and failed to mention side effects, largely on the hope that they would go away and that some actual benefit would begin to show up at some point.

In my case, since I was not a minor, eventually they had to acknowledge that the treatment was ill advised, and I had the right to discontinue treatment "against medical advice" if I chose to. I chose to discuss it, but I'm not convinced to this day that I entirely persuaded the doctor. Then again, the prescribing doctor saw me, at most, once a month for half an hour, so there's little hope that I could have conveyed to him the full details of the situation, or that he would have been able to clear out the noise coming from his own medical training to be able to listen to me with no prejudice at all. But I'm fairly sure that, had I been even more quiet and compliant, and respectful of his expertise, I would probably already be dead, and I'm fairly certain that the treatment in question has significantly shortened my lifespan.

I'm not saying parents should be entirely free to use voodoo rather than effective medicine. I am saying, though, that this is a much more complicated issue than the courts and police agencies seem to have turned it into in this case, (and I have too little direct evidence to say who is right about the medical decisions being, in this case, coerced by the state). But I do think there may be a lesson here about how certain professions should stick to their own realms of competency. In my experience, the average judge or lawyer knows bugger-all about medicine.

The fact that one natural health looner may be laughable and factually wrong, and has made a video that appears to exploit this situation in order to promote his own hobby horse, does not automatically mean that the doctors are necessarily right in this case. One is almost entirely unrelated to the other.

Life is finite, and a statistical argument does not mean that the child in this case will necessarily be "saved" by the court-mandated treatment. And my prejudice is largely to dismiss the medical savvy of judges. I also doubt there is an ideal solution in this case, and I can form sympathy with those who might say that the probability of a recovery due to treatment might not be the best choice in a case involving a child whose mental disabilities might make that survival something that is not serving either his or the public's interest. Save him now, and if he ever learns to read, you may have created just another loon to cloud the issues when it comes to rational choices being made through semi-democratic processes.

Judges should not play doctor, and doctors should not play judge. I think Plato said something like that once.

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

From my point of view all I have to say is this.
If the kid doesn't get chimo he will die, if he does have chimo he will live a good and healty life (and all this trouble would all go away).
Everything else is fluf.

 

[ebbixx]

If the kid doesn't get chimo he will die, if he does have chimo he will live a good and healty life (and all this trouble would all go away).

You have absolute proof for this? (And what is "chimo"?)

A. Remissions happen, sometimes for reasons no one can explain;
B. Some percentage of patients given a highly toxic treatment regimen (which no doctor I know will deny that chemo is) will die. How do you know this kid isn't one of them? 90% survival rate still means that 10% die.

I agree the odds are probably with you. But then again, all I know about the child and the parents is the very limited and highly edited version of the story I'm getting from the press, which seems even worse and more manipulative than usual, and smatterings of stuff that's mainly coming from whackjob nutters like the guy in the video and tells me almost nothing about the actual situation.

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

You have absolute proof for this? (And what is "chimo"?)

I mean chemo. I don't have absolute proff, nobody has (except in math), but what we know points that way.

A. Remissions happen, sometimes for reasons no one can explain;
B. Some percentage of patients given a highly toxic treatment regimen (which no doctor I know will deny that chemo is) will die. How do you know this kid isn't one of them? 90% survival rate still means that 10% die.

Sometimes they forgot they had terapy, but that is besides the point. The point is the situation doesn't play at his favour, and whatever negative symthoms he had during chemo was predictable and are not out of the ordinary. Denying the expertise of proffessionals (that holds the best knowned solution) is hardly a good answer.

 

[ebbixx]

The point is the situation doesn't play at his favour, and whatever negative symthoms he had during chemo was predictable and are not out of the ordinary. Denying the expertise of proffessionals (that holds the best knowned solution) is hardly a good answer.

I never claimed it was necessarily a good answer. In terms of statistics he may well be more likely to have a bad outcome than a good one.

My core argument was about free will and agency. If one accepts that people have a right to make decisions, that needs to include the right to make decisions that the majority may view as bad ones. And intangibles such as stress and emotion also have an effect on treatment outcomes. The picture I get of this kid suggests that he will neither fully understand nor accept what is happening to him, and what will happen if his mother is arrested and his emotional support system is stripped from him? Unless nursing staff are able to supervise him constantly (and in the US that's about as likely as VenomfangX graduating from Cambridge as a physics major) I expect he would do things during chemo that might well cause further harm, and impair healing, even if the chemo itself is effective.

Given the nature of chemo, I think there's a lot more to this than just "getting him into chemo again."

Also, considering the allegations that the mother is headed for Mexico, it sounds like she probably has an alternative treatment plan in mind. It might not be one the majority agree with, but is it the right of the majority to dictate a specific treatment plan, or is the intent of the law to ensure that a parent does not choose to forego treatment altogether? Are you entirely sure that the consensus allopathic approach is necessarily the only valid approach? Because I knew quite a few Harvard Med students who took many alternative modalities fairly seriously, and know some graduates who still do have their doubts that allopathy is the only valid approach.

 

[RestrictedAccess]

It's one thing to sit around and pray over your child's dying body, and another thing to search for alternative remedies. Both are ineffective (for the most part), but at least one shows genuine effort.

Unless the judge is going to pay for the chemo, he's got no business taking the kid from his parents or forcing the child through chemo. Like someone else said, we don't know the full details, but I can't see neglect if the parents are actually making an effort to find a solution.

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

Not knowing the law isn't an excuse to break it.
Denying an genuin solution for a non-solution isn't doing less harm either they realise it or not.

And in this situation, hell yeah it is the right of the court to take the child out of the parents hands, because a well tough taught decision will actualy give the kid a better quality of life (or even more, save his life all togheter).

As I said, everything else is fluff.

 

[Artsysiridean]

Not knowing the law isn't an excuse to break it.
Denying an genuin solution for a non-solution isn't doing less harm either they realise it or not.

And in this situation, hell yeah it is the right of the court to take the child out of the parents hands, because a well tough taught decision will actualy give the kid a better quality of life (or even more, save his life all togheter).

As I said, everything else is fluff.

Maybe I should clarify a bit on my own views on this, and why I brought it to the League's attention.

This is a textbook example of something clear becoming pigeonhole'd, two groups fighting for the right to be right causing such a devastating outcome. Simply put after the David's welfare was called into question both sides seem to try to outdo each other in what should be done and what steps should be taken to assess the situation. That's a clusterfuck anyway you look at it.

I posted this here thanks to the very nature of this and what came from it as a whole. Is every case where someone rejects modern medicines wrong? Should every view included in this be attributed to how high of a regard something is held in or lack thereof (religious, political, or psychological views)? And what can be done to help people better understand the situation rather then having fscts get muddled in with scare mongering and lack of research, much like our friend HealthRanger seems to be doing.

My personal view on the Hauser case as a whole is that this could've been handled better from the getgo, from almost all parties. I blame David's parents for not knowing what they were getting into and the result of their actions, nor education their son as much as they should have educated themselves, and the officials in this case for recommending Chemotherapy and nothing else "because it's the right thing to do (Then again it's easy to point fingers while we sit in ivory towers that stretches into the sky, watching). No one's right here, and won't be until David condition improves far beyond now.

And I morally bankrupt myself for recommending THC oil while still thinking all this is wrong.

 

[ebbixx]

Not knowing the law isn't an excuse to break it.

If the law were as clear cut here as you seem to imply, why is it we still have human judges, rather than calculators, making such distinctions and decisions?

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

If the law were as clear cut here as you seem to imply, why is it we still have human judges, rather than calculators, making such distinctions and decisions?

My statment doesn't say that law is clear cut. What I am saying is that when you don't know that you have screwed things it doesn't make thing less screwed. And if there is something that we can't aford is to give everyone a freeride.


And if there is something that can't quite pass trough my mind is people making "what if" statments to justify this mess of a situation. There is no "what if" here, the chemo wasn't harming him more then what was already predicted, the chemo could save him and the parents may actually end up killing him for crazy mambojambo. So if anyone else says "well it isn't axcatly so" because "what if" I personaly don't want to hear.

 

[Nikki Ninja]

I believe that the government should get involved if the childs health is at risk. This child has a very high survival rate if put on chemotherapy. The mother is part of the spritual group called the Nemenhah Band, a group that believes in natural healing.

"We believe that men and women have been endowed with intelligence enough to govern themselves in such a manner as to guarantee to themselves these freedoms, to establish just and right ways to deal with each other, to maintain a tranquil and secure domestic life, provide for defense of these rights when needed, and to insure for ourselves and our posterity the blessings that our culture, traditions, and teachings bring."

This is part of thier preamble in their consitution.
http://www.nemenhah.org/internal/constitution.html

I believe in certain situations these circumstances should be nulled. I believe the courts are justified to limit these freedoms when it involves physical harm of another person, in this situation that being this teen, for which he has a significantly high chance at life. We all have limits, it's the way we are governed in everyday life, No one is completely free. This nutjob mother has to have limits put on these religious freedoms for it is putting a serious gamble on her sons life, her doctor saying he has little to no chance of survival if left untreated.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

The chemo shrunk his tumor. Since he stopped the treatments the tumor got bigger. These are facts.

The government HAS to step in when a child is going to die because his parents are fucking batshit crazy. Slapping a "freedom of religion" sticker on their insanity doesn't give them a pass.

 

[ebbixx]

The chemo shrunk his tumor. Since he stopped the treatments the tumor got bigger. These are facts.

The government HAS to step in when a child is going to die because his parents are fucking batshit crazy. Slapping a "freedom of religion" sticker on their insanity doesn't give them a pass.

I respectfully disagree. But then again, there's a little bit of soft-core eugenics behind my wishing to give them the decision to decide whether they or allopaths are right about treatment. Also, I'd rather not be taxed for the not insignificant costs of enforcing such futile (and possibly counterproductive) "protections."

 

[ImprobableJoe]

I respectfully disagree. But then again, there's a little bit of soft-core eugenics behind my wishing to give them the decision to decide whether they or allopaths are right about treatment. Also, I'd rather not be taxed for the not insignificant costs of enforcing such futile (and possibly counterproductive) "protections."

Adults can make those choices for themselves. We should not allow lunatics to make those decisions for their children. And as far as the cost... money is insignificant compared to the cost of forsaking what are left of our values.

 

[Otokogoroshi]

Adults can make those choices for themselves. We should not allow lunatics to make those decisions for their children. And as far as the cost... money is insignificant compared to the cost of forsaking what are left of our values.

I agree. This poor kid can't even read from what I saw in an article. His parents keep him sheltered he isn't even part of the real world! This kid hasn't even had a chance to make something close to an informed decision on the therapy. His mother running off with him will only fuck him up worse.

 

[Artsysiridean]

I agree. This poor kid can't even read from what I saw in an article. His parents keep him sheltered he isn't even part of the real world! This kid hasn't even had a chance to make something close to an informed decision on the therapy. His mother running off with him will only fuck him up worse.

No, he cannot read. And he has a Blackberry.