It’s sad that people ignore medical opinions. I’m mad, too. Seems like the snake oil era is still with us. By 2025, gov’t hasn’t present sufficient safeguards.
I’m sorry, Beck.
Some years ago, I knew a couple who tried to treat the wife’s breast cancer with prayer.
That did not end well.
Oh, Beck, I am so very sorry to hear about this.
I think the catch is that unless Edith had some sort of dementia, she did this of her own accord. While I agree that the promulgation of harmfully stupid ideas should be criminal, it currently isn’t, and you can’t really prosecute someone else for telling someone something that’s stupid and detrimental, if that person goes on to do it to themselves.
I would imagine the best you can do would be something like this:
Arkansas Code Title 5. Criminal Offenses § 5-10-107 | FindLaw
and even that would essentially require the prosecutor, judge, and jury to all be on board with the idea that it was a suicide, and not just a moronically stupid unfortunate situation. Which based on the rural Arkansans I’ve known (with the exception of two), would just be considered unfortunate.
Yeah, I was given plenty of stupid advice about cancer, but as a mentally competent adult, I consulted and made my own decisions, for better or for ill.
Note that, according to the OP, the niece was also acting in the role of the woman’s caretaker, which is beyond just telling someone a “harmfully stupid idea,” but being in a direct position to steer the woman’s care in the harmfully stupid direction.
Unless it can be demonstrated that the niece was willfully withholding treatment for Edith. I don’t know if that’s the case, obviously, but it might be.
In the current political environment it’s probably more likely to get you appointed to the dept health and human services 
Without unnecessarily bringing politics into an apolitical post it’s impossible to ignore how much this kind of situation has been actively encouraged and enabled by the current administration generally and the health secretary specifically. This poor woman paid the price for that. Whether or not the niece is explicitly MAHA the top-down encouragement of this kind of thing by the very people whose duty it is to protect Americans from it, is unforgivable
May I take a contrary view? Maybe Edith was tired and wanted to die. Doing it this way she’s not going into the woods to die of exposure, she is making her niece happy by taking care of Aunt Edith, and maybe rationalizing that her niece is right about the treatment because if not, what is different than what’s going on now?
I kinda suggested something similar upthread. If you’re at the stage of Type 2 diabetes, and kidney failure, where you’re on dialysis, you aren’t going to get better; the treatment prolongs your life, but at a cost. Edith may have felt, “well, what the doctors are doing isn’t making me any better, so why not give this idea a shot? I don’t have anything to lose at this point.”
Twelve years ago my brother, after some 30+ years on dialyses, decided he’d had enough. So he stopped. My sister was somewhat on board, but also not, and convinced him that the ancient Romans successfully treated kidney failure by sweating out the toxins with hot baths. After fishing a very scrawny and slippery man out of the bathtub several times I can report that hot baths do not replace functioning kidneys.
Neither sister or brother were dumb in the least, quite the opposite, but desperation messes up your thinking.
I’m sorry for your loss Beckdawrek. I know with all the time spent at dialysis it’s inevitable that you make connections with the people there.
I had a work colleague who was a vibrant 27-year old young woman who was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. The five-year survival rate for someone her age is reportedly only 37.6% with treatment, but she was very concerned with the potential long-term side effects of conventional cancer treatment and decided to go with alternative “natural” treatment instead.
So she took a leave of absence from her job as an environmental engineer and abruptly moved from New England to Florida to get woo alternative treatment at some facility run by crackpots. Her treatment basically consisted of meditation, vitamin/supplement infusions, positive thoughts, and wishful thinking. She posted that she was “healing from stage 4 breast cancer WITHOUT surgery, chemo or radiation.” That post was four months after her diagnosis. She died two months later.
Note that she was very intelligent, but like Steve Jobs she apparently went too far down the alternative medicine rabbit hole.
Since she worked for a consultant and I was not getting updates from anyone, I didn’t actually find out what happened to her until after she died. She left behind a bunch of Instagram posts and podcasts about her “healing journey.”
What’s worse is that the crackpot facility she was getting “treatment” from wasn’t covered by her insurance, and so were hounding her for money in the last months of her life. Plus it was in Florida so she didn’t have any local support from family or friends. Again, I didn’t find any of this out until after she passed.
I know that conventional cancer treatment has serious side effects, but I have to believe that she would have lasted longer than six months if she had gotten mainstream evidence-based treatment. It was so sad to watch her get progressively sicker and weaker—but no less upbeat—in her various posts and videos.
I had a cousin who recently decided pretty much the same thing, although it wasn’t from kidney disease/dialysis. I doubt that would be the case with Edith, however, because she was AT a dialysis facility, presumably for the exact treatment that is intended to keep her alive. If she had decided she’d had enough, why go through the hassle of going to the clinic? She could have just told her niece that she’s feeling like she doesn’t need dialysis today.
The only thing more cringe-inducing than a “healing journey” is a “healing adventure”.
I can sort of see the appeal. Treatments for cancer sound very unpleasant. I had a friend who went through it (now in remission.) I absolutely hate nausea and pregnancy was bad enough with all that. So if someone offers you a “self-care” path instead of having a hole put into your chest, it’s gotta be tempting.
Unfortunately this kind of woo shows up around “curing” autism as well. And it can be fatal. We have a distant cousin who is always peddling woo (for money.) I once came home after a very hard day to find this woman putting electrodes on my husband’s head - he was too polite to say no - and she handed me what looked like a pair of headphones but were ostensibly some kind of brain wave treatment and told me it would help my son. I wanted to drop kick her through a window.