cancer patient REQUIRED to receive chemo therapy?!

should parents have full control over a minor’s health (as if it was their own)?

  • yes
  • no
0 voters

based on story here:
http://www.foodconsumer.org/777/8/Boy_with_cancer_forced_to_undergo_conventional_treatments.shtml

quick synopsis:
16-year-old boy was receiving natural therapy for his cancer until a judge has recently ordered him to receive chemotherapy … against his will and that of his parents.

an interesting point in this article is another example of another younger girl who’s parents successfully fought against courts and doctors in order to give their girl a natural therapy. the doctors said she would live 2 months. she is past her 2 months and is in her best condition … with natural remedies.

the question i have, is one of parental control. let’s assume, for sake of argument, that convential medicine is more effective than natural remedies. if the parents of a minor, who is assumed unable to make the best decisions for himself, decide against a more effective treatment, should it be illegal?

what if that conventional treatment is quite harsh, painful, damaging in other ways, etc? so it increases your chances of survival, but at what costs? where do you draw the line between doing whatever it takes for survival versus doing the less invasive/emotionally damaging treatments that are less (sometimes only slightly less) effective?

For every case it is different. I believe that parents should retain responsibility. A parent has the childs best interest at heart while Doctors care mostly for the money they make not, the child. Doctors have been given too much power. Parents can’t afford lawyers they have already spent all their money on Doctors. So how can they fairly win? The gov’t will always lean towards an establishment it seems . The loving family gets screwed. And when conventional remedies fail the family pays for that too. I would hope that if the court orders conventional medicine that the hospital picks up the tab rather then the family, but, who am I kidding, we know the family will be forced to pay that tab too.

Hierarchy: Child’s opinion, Parent’s opinion, state’s opinion. It is none of the state’s buisness until the state explains exactly how the child’s receiving natural therapy (what the hell is that, praying?) affects other Americans. Otherwise it’s “for your own good” which is the first step of a really bad path.

Bishop wrote

The “natural therapy” for cancer is typically death.

The 16 year-old boy is a minor. Parents don’t own their children, nor do they have carte blanche to kill them.

The kid will have to wait at least to the age of 18 before we’ll allow him to commit any kind of slow suicide in public.

The judge acted in the best interest of a child.

Poor kid. Good judge. Freaky parents.

Michael

actually, “natural therapy” includes things like herbal supplements, traditional chinese medicine, ayurvedic medicine, chelation therapy, diet obviously, and others.

studies, and subsequently statistics, are not kept on “natural” remedies because they cannot be patented and thus produce zero financial motivation. either way, the success rate of those that are studied have a results. the big difference is the side effects of such treatment are minuscule compared to that of conventional treatments, with chemotherapy being just about the worst.

“In one study, powdered Schizandrae was administered to 102 patients with hepatitis. The overall success rate was 76 percent, and in cases where SGPT levels were over 300 U/L, the success rate was 72 percent. It took an average of twenty-five days for liver enzymes to return to normal with no adverse side- effects from the treatment.”
Bensky D, Gamble A. Chinese Herbal Medicine: Materia Medica, Revised Edition. Seattle, WA: Eastland Press; 1993.

so who does own a child? the government? if the child is a minor and not capable of independant thought, and the parents don’t “own” them, who does that leave? why should i, as a parent, trust the will of the government to give my flesh and blood the best care, be it a painless death or a tortured life?

as THEZEUS18 stated, if the decision one of the gov’t saying it’s “for your own good”, then where does that stop? taken to extremes, a study could show 60 minutes of exercise every day was benefitial for all and thus be mandatory? headline could read, “judge orders family back from vacation to go to the gym instead.”

This is false information. (I used to own a health shop)

One of my suppliers healed himself from cancer with wheatgrass therapy. I kid you not. Grape seeds are also a highly effective treatment as are broccoli sprouts. Why are some people able to heal themselves naturally and others are unable to do so even with chemical treatment? There is a mind/body connection. Healing isn’t simple about putting a bunch of drugs in the body, healing is a process that involves an awareness of the disease and it’s causes. Healing stems from the word whole - wholesome - holistic.

Of course the conventional world is sceptical, why? Because we believe that science is able to solve all our problems. But science is really man made, the body is made up of infinte wisdom and this wisdom is reflected in nature. Why would nature not provide healing for dis-ease?

Of course the pharmaceutical companies would suffer if information on holistic approaches were taken seriously, how dare we take our own lives into our own hands? Whose life is it anyway?

A

as for the original post, this comes down to establishing the age of majority in a society. There must be a line in the sand before which and individual is not considered to be able to make adult decisions. These adult decisions are usually taken to include voting, wills, deciding on medical care, etc.

Should this one have gone as it did? I don’t know, but I do support the notion of the state being able to intervene in the lives of minors when their parents show a lack of appropriate care. I wonder how differently bishop would feel about this case if the parents were refusing treatment for the child.

We really should seperate the alternative versus mainstream medicine debate from the issue of self determination and autonomy for the minor.

As far as alternative medicine… it seems to work for a lot of people. (Like the Chinese for thousands of years.) Undeniably there is something there. I do have a few concerns about the nature of industry regulation and about some of the claims that are made about it’s effects. However, there is definitely something to it, and it can work.

I think one of the major issues in the alternative versus mainstream medical debate is that normal medicine can learn a lot from alternative approaches in terms of the mind body connection and the role of diet and lifestyle in health. I am concerned though that are just as many sharks and snake oil salesmen in both industries and what we really need is community level dialogue that includes a diverse number of practitioners from all health disciplines and normal lay people. We also need to give a much larger role to the social determinants of health. Get them from the WHO, you’ll be amazed.

http://www.who.dk/document/e81384.pdf

cheers,
gemty

Age of majority, right. But who decides when the individual is unable to decide for himself? The group most likely to choose what the individual himself would want? Or the group most likely to choose correctly?

tz18:
well that’s the difficulty isn’t it?

Even the two you suggested as possibilities are problematic. Define choosing “correctly”.

I personally believe that we ought to act to maximise the autonomy of every person in the medical context, but, at the same time, I recognise that not everyone can have autonomy at all times and that sometimes decisions must be made that violate a patient’s autonomy. The age of majority is a concept which denies those below that age the autonomy to fully control their lives.

No matter which age we set it at there will be cases where an individual below that age is capable of exercising the rights we assign to the group above that age. For this reason, it seems to me that 18 is as good an age as any. If we dropped it to 16 we would be in exactly the same position. A mature 15 year old would be able to challenge the age and say that it was fair that they couldn’t exercise their rights.

If the concept of an age of majority is valuable (which I think it is) then we must accept the relatively infrequent cases of non-autonomy that it entails for certain groups. After all, despite the amount of media attention that these cases get, there are relatively few of them. The rights of young people are enhanced and protected by these laws much more often than they are trampled by them.

cheers,
gemty

Wait. Why do we have the age of autonomy?

If it is out of fear that kids won’t choose correctly, will not make the choice that is most beneficial for them, then it would appear that we should let the chooser that is most likely to be right decide. So the argument becomes, which is the chooser more likely to be right?

Not many 18 year olds are even mature enough to even know the difference between complementary therapies and allopathy. They simply do not understand that conventional treatment can be just as harmful as complementary treatment. There is ignorance among 20 somethings and 30 somethings and so on. Is it ok to allow a 40 year old man to harm himself through alcoholism for example simply because he is mature enough to live his life as he chooses? Since when did ‘no, I do not want to put chemicals in my body’ become anyone’s decision but mine? A child knows that an adult behaving sexually towards him ‘feels’ wrong. Why do we now say that he is incapable of knowing what ‘feels’ wong in terms of his own healing? Worse, why do we now take the decision away from his parents out of our own ignorance?

A

Define the right “choice.” We cannot let the one most likely to choose rightly make this choice because we do not have any universal definition of what is right for this type of case. What is right for the boy is different from what is right for the parents as it is different from the right for the judge.

cheers,
gemty

The parents in both of these cases were not following passive therapy which would be prayers only. Although, I have no doubt that they are praying quite alot. These parents were/ are actively treating the cancer with unaproved (FDA unaproved) treatments. These treatments have a very good success rate but, the pharmecuticals can’t own the patents on nature. So they actively destroy knowledge and kill any success stories.

The Gov’t. overstepped its boundries because the corporations told it to.
eastern medicine is vastly older then western, both can add to each other and enhance but, unfortunately western medicine has gone numbers, monetary and blind. western medicine is not out to cure disease just to control it. There is no money if the disease can be cured.

i think gemty hit on something very important to this question here:

when deciding a choice such as this one, is there really any true right or wrong answer? isn’t a significant part of this up to emotion and perception?

we know the power of the placebo effect, hence the power of the mind over the body. so the decision made by the person whom that decision is going to effect is going to be more ‘right,’ as in more effective, solely because they believe in it more than their alternatives.

as Kriswest mentioned that the gov’t had overstepped its bounds, but at what point should the gov’t, being created to guarantee life and liberty, step in to protect an incapable person?

gemty asked if i would feel differently if the parents were refusing treatment. in the case of chemo, doubtfully. primarily because success rates are not that great and treatment is so extreme it has lifelong negative effects. i can understand a parent’s wish to let such a powerful disease do what is most likely to happen in a painless way.

however, if it was another disease with a harmless, highly-effective, non-invasive treatment, i would want the gov’t to intervene on behalf of getting the minor healthy. there is a line for me that stands between full treatment and no treatment that oscillates back and forth depending on what the end result is in a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual sense.

Each case must and I repeat must, be reviewed individually and by a neutral third party, not the gov’t nor other interested parties, for the sake of the minor, especially if the minor is in stable condition. If the minor is failing at a rapid rate then steps must be taken to stabalize until a verdict is reached. Some parents and other parties are truly biased in selfish ways niether particularly benefiting to the minor. There must be more child advocates licensed.

A,

Could you give me a link about the wheatgrass therapy? I think if it has such grand effects on the sick, think how great it would be on the healthy. I may start downing some at JambaJuice. :smiley:

cancertutor.com/Cancer/Wheatgrass.html

One also needs to drink pure water. i.e. distilled or reverse osmosis water. Also a diet of pure raw vegetables, no meats, no dairy, no processed or cooked food…But also I urge you to do the proper research. The wheatgrass juicer needs to squeeze rather than cut the grass etc…supplement with other raw juices and black grapes. Eat like loads of them often and make sure that the seeds are chewed as all the goodness is in the seeds.

A

Hello F(r)iends,

You are awe inspiring… I swear at times I almost think you are joking.
The above is meant as a compliment.

I kinda/sorta believe in natural healing…
I am rarely ill, and when I am, I do not take medicine.
No cough syrup or cold/flu drugs, no aspirin.
A bit of tea, honey, lemon will do the trick.
The last time I took medicine was about 2 years ago, I woke up groggy.
My body told me it did not like that Nyquil.

-Thirst

Nyquil is made by the demons of hell! That stuff is nasty! I am imressed you could take it. On the other side it does kill fire ant hills pretty good.
Although I leave fire ant hills in my gardens. They are great natural pest controllers and they keep the earth loose and fertilized a bit. I only remove them when they move too close to the house.

Thank you.

Sometimes I almost am.

A