I find this highly disturbing that a court can order you to get treatment you don’t like, or find extremely painful.
I’ve heard it said by many that if they had serious cancer, they wouldn’t want to go through the pain and trouble of trying to eradicate it, and would rather go on their own. The Mom and Son in this scenario actually want to try alternative medicine. I say that should be their right to do so.
Side topic, but related: Then there’s that 555lb kid that was on the loose, and the police are after them for that too. Is this different than the kid with cancer? I mean, being overweight isn’t like cancer, in that treatment isn’t painful (fight my ignorance?), but I acknowledge that exercise at that size isn’t easy, but I wouldn’t think painful like chemotherapy. And the mother in this case truly is neglecting him and his needs.
How common is it that a court can order you to take a treatment suggested by doctors? Where is the line drawn between neglect, and your right to refuse treatment by The Man?
IMHO, the fact that the family is trumpeting prayer and herbal remedies is clouding the issue and making it religion versus science instead of “doing nothing” versus “doing something”. I don’t think western medicine has all the answers, nor do I think there is no power of prayer (psychosomatic or spiritual). But this run-away mom is playing a very risky experiment on her kid. The government steps when scientists perform risky experiments on animals. Why wouldn’t they do that when it comes to parents and their children?
Because she’s praying and doing the Native American herbal thing–two things that both spiritual and pseudo-spiritual people claim work–it’s assumed she’s got a reasonable alternative therapy plan. But I really doubt that she’d have support if she thought junkfood or training for a marathon would cure him. Or if she decided he didn’t need anything and let him live as if nothing was wrong. How do we justify condemning a “do nothing” approach, but not condemn therapies with results that are so nebulous and unprovable, they are just like doing nothing.
The government has a responsibility to protect citizens from being abused by their parents’ ideologies. Imagine a society where it was forbidden for the government to intervene in such cases as this one, in which a child is killed by parents who believe that it’s morally wrong to eat animal products–including dairy. If it’s not wrong for the government to keep abuse like that from happening, then it’s not really wrong for them to weigh in on a case like in the OP.
I don’t know if forcing the kid to take chemo is the answer, but it seems like there has to be a reasonable alternative that all parties can agree to.
Maybe he does understand the treatment and what’s at stake?
monstro, I agree that there are cases where the parents are straight up crazy, scary crazy in fact. But a case like this, it seems the child and parent should be able to make that choice on their own. I can’t pinpoint why I feel it’s different than those types of cases as you cited, but it feels different. Maybe it’s the court ordered use of western medicine, where as the case you cited was parents being stupid before any court was involved to begin with. With this case, I can only assume that the parent and son went to the doctor due to symptoms. When the treatment wasn’t what he wanted, he said to hell with that, and now our justice system is forcing him to get the treatment? That is worse than the parent running off with her child IMO. It seems in this case, the doctors want to do it for their own research benefit.
I found this story… where the doctors threaten the parent with court, and the child goes through all the pain and misery, and dies anyway.
I argued about this with a coworker the other day, and we decided that it was religion that was clouding this debate. If they didn’t cite their religion as a reason for their negligence, and instead stated they simply didn’t want to spend the money, there would be no outcry at the courts decision. The simple fact is the parents are ignoring knowledgable experts for whatever reason, and hence are placing their child at extreme risk. The fact that they think they are doing the right thing doesn’t make it true, or absolve them of responsibility.
I say give him chemo, wait until he is 40, has a wife and kids of his own, then ask him if he thinks the state should have let his parents ignorance kill him. That will be the answer we need, and I’m pretty sure we can all guess what it will be.
He doesn’t. The judge and social services said so. The boy is mentally handicapped, illiterate, and thinks he’s an elder (though he doesn’t know what the word means) medicine man. He cannont recognize the word “the” by sight. The boy doesn’t know that he’s sick and thinks that chemo killed his aunt, as opposed to her cancer. The affidavit provided to the court in which the child states his objection to treatment was blatantly written by an adult, possibly mom but not definitely.
It’s important to realize here, also, that the court isn’t making the kid get chemo. The state legislature is. The court is enforcing the law that says “complementary and/or alternative medicine is not sufficient” to meet the parents’ responsibility to provide “necessary medical care”. The mother is in violation of this. All 5 doctors*, including one (some?) from the Mayo Clinic, have recommended a treatment of chemo and radiation.
A sixth doctor** stated he wouldn’t take chemo for anything in the world. And to force it would be “criminal behavior”. The judge, of course, dismissed this latter claim. The doctor did agree, however, that chemo and radiation are the standard treatment.
So what we have here are laws that say
Parents- you have to give you kid necessary medical care
The state may trump the right to freedom of expression when it has a compelling interest to do so.
Alternative medicine DOES NOT qualify as necessary medical care
And what we’ve found are that
The mom isn’t giving necessary medical care.
N.M.C. in this case, according to 6 specialists, is chemo and radiation.
The boy’s life is at stake (90% vs. 5% success) and makes his life a compelling state interest
So, ParentalAdvisory, it is false that “The mom and son want…” It’s actually “The mom wants…” and the law says it clearly isn’t her right to do so.
*Familiar with the boy’s case
**Not familiar with the boy’s case
Should be noted that the kids cancer is also very treatable, like something around 90% survival rate with treatment. Without treatment, its pretty close to 100% mortality over five years.
The mother is murdering her son by not allowing him to get treatment. It’s the moral equivalent of not feeding your kid because your religion thinks its a sin to eat.
So it’s agreed then that minors have no rights as to their recommended treatment, and that the parents also have no rights to refuse treatment for their child when there’s a “compelling interest” by the legislature and a majority of doctors?
A majority of doctors say you need it, and the legislature will agree if they have a “compelling interest” interest to do so? Which to me means, save the life of the future tax payer, or do it for the research. Otherwise, what compelling interest to they have?
Is there any chance that the 90% success rate is not true for HL?
I didn’t know the kid was mentally handicapped, maybe I misread, or missed that article.
Do minors have patient rights?
When can a parent refuse a majority opinion on treatment for their child?
The kid is 13 years old, mentally challenged and has a disease that’s highly survivable with chemo and highly fatal without. There IS no “alternative” treatment. The quack that these parents wanted to go to in lieu of chemo has been twice convicted of fraud, and there is NO treatment beside chemo which gives this chance of survival.
Parents don’t have a right to kill their kids. That’s the bottom line. The kid has a right to live, and doesn’t have the mental capacity to make his own decision. Preventing this kid from getting chemo is exactly the same as letting him bleed to death after he gets hit by a car. kids are not chattel. Parents don’t own them. They have individual rights of their won.
How asinine is to to decide that you’re going to get better advice and treatment in Mexico than you can at the Mayo clinic?
And as Dio points out, this is a disease that is survivable with the treatment and a death sentence without. I don’t think the kid realizes that he’s almost certainly going to die.
ETA: I guess I look at it the same way as if a parent was depriving their child of food, or if they were diabetic, of insulin. These parents are depriving their child of something that will almost certainly save his life.
Why do the opponents on issues like this always stretch “this case” into “all cases”? No one said minors have no rights to their treatments. We’ve said that this boy is incapable of making a decision on his treatment. That does not translate to “minors have no rights…”
The compelling interest part means that the state can protect children from their wacko parents. If I beat my kid, lock them up, starve them, or- in this case- fail to provide necessary medical care, then the *interest *of the child *compells *the state to trump the parent’s right to parent as they see fit. In the case files, the judge writes “What could be more compelling than the life of a child?” and clearly states that the life is at risk. That phrase, “compelling interest”, has nothing to do with the interests of the legislature or the doctors as in “bring in tax money”, etc. It means that the state, in acting to overrule parents, much show in court that there is a reason to do so. Not a flimsy reason, but a compelling reason. That is, the state must act. In this case, the boy’s life is threatened. The judge clearly writes that this meets the criteria and so the parents can not successfully argue “We’re the parents, so what we say goes!”
There’s no way to know now what his success rate is. The last Xray was taken in April and was much worse than measured after the first dose of chemo.
IANAL, so I don’t know when minors have rights. The case files show that the boy’s parents do have a right to a second (or more) opinion, and that they got it. But for Stage IIB Hodgkin’s, all the doctors agreed that there is no other treatment. Had the defense been able to show that there was some other accepted course of treatment that could rival (or even come close) chemo/radiation, then they might have won.
This isn’t some advanced brain tumor where he only has a small chance of survival. Hodgkin’s, as far as I know, is a very treatable form of cancer. Not treating him, on the other hand, will definitely kill him.
Ok, I read the judgement and am inclined to agree.
But for the record, I’m not usually an ‘opponent on issues like these’.
Not feeding your kid - government should intervene.
Lock up your kid - government should intervene.
Beat up your kid - government should intervene.
Naturally occuring medical conditions - Definite gray area for me, and what constitutes necessary medical care is also kind of a gray area. Even the judgement recognized the differences people may have on a ruling such as that.
So I’m not some kind of relgious wacko who think berries and rain dances are going to cure cancer. But I am a fan of individual and parents rights concerning naturally occuring medical conditions, but also recognize when governments should intrude on certain cases.
One can certainly picture a case where it’s much more of a gray area then this one. If the treatments only slightly improved the chance of survival, or the chance of survival without treatment was greater, or if the kid was fully mentally functional and closer to the age of majority.
But this is about as clear-cut as these things get, the kids obviously incapable of making the decision himself and refusing treatment is an effectively murder.
To protect the life of a child who cannot defend himself? That the decision of the parent that endangers the life of the child does not trump the interest of the child to live? Interesting twist on the right-to-life point of view.
The answer is the same as the answer for “Is there any chance that the failure rate of alternative treatments is more than 10%?” The evidence that alternative treatments work is inferior in quantity and quality to evidence that chemo and radiation can and do cure HL. That 90% figure was not pulled out of thin air. The claims that alternative treatments do cure HL are based on not much more than air, and much of that heated.
This boy has the full patient rights you want, then he should also have the right to vote and be drafted. The ability to determine one’s appropriate medical care is also the ability to choose a leader or defend this country, right? Or maybe certain abilities appear at certain times, and right now, this boy does not have the ability to determine his appropriate care.
Your issue seems to be more about self-determination and rejection of modern medicine than it is about appropriate medical care. If someone was about to drink bleach, confident that prayer and herbs would prevent death from ingesting a poison, would you stop them? If yes, then you must be relying on empirical evidence that convinces you that bleach is harmful. That same empirical evidence tells us that chemo and radiation have a 90% success rate with HL. If no, then you would be allowing a death out of respect for that person’s decision and as an act of faith in their beliefs. Is the sacrifice of this boy’s life to personal freedom and alternative medicine a greater good than the temporary sacrifice of his liberty to undergo chemo and radiation?
On edit, I see you have changed your mind. The questions stand to be considered in such gray areas, rather than being pointed directly at you.
But when someone dies, it’s kind of too late, right? Think how great it would be if someone had intervened before that little baby had succumbed to his parents’ foolishness.
If this kid was hopeless and had only a small chance of surviving with chemo, then I would agree that the government should let the situation play out the way the parents’ choose. But that’s not what’s going on here.
If we were talking about an adult I would agree. But this is a child who is extremely likely to be cured and live a healthy life if he gets chemotherapy, and who is almost certain to die soon if he doesn’t. That, and the fact that he does not understand his illness or treatment in the first place, makes this a pretty simple decision.
Having read this, it seems to me that Daniel is disabled, extremely impressionable, and trying to please his mother, who doesn’t think much of medical practice and is very much ignorant of medicine. As a result, Daniel says he’s a believer and a member of the Nemenhah Band, when he doesn’t even understand what that is or what they believe- but he knows his mother likes it. Adults have the right to make stupid decisions about their medical care, sometimes based on misunderstandings of what is happening. But there’s no reason for this kid to die because of his mother’s views and because he does not understand the situation he is in. It would be stupid for him to die as a result of this situation. Minnesota law appears to let the government get involved in this case and I’ve got no problem with it.