Judge says forcing aboriginal girl to stay in chemo is to ‘impose our world view on First Nation culture’

Timebandit wrote:

Regardless your experience of the world, biology doesn't bow to culture or worldview.

Actually, there is evidence that it does.

But regarding swallow's post right above:

Timebandit wrote:

The only treatment that had any chance of saving that child's life that we know of at present was chemotherapy. The odds were never 100%, the outcome never entirely ensured, but removal of that treatment effectively removed any hope at all.  This isn't a condemnation of culture, it's just a fact.

This is why this discussion is situated in this forum. And Timebandit's proclamations are out of place here. [Edited to remove inflammatory language because I think Timebandit genuinely believes science and medical science are value-neutral activities and do not serve hegemonic agendas at all.]

Timebandit wrote:

  My objection has been that we can't definitively say that the effect of chemo was the cause of death in Makayla's particular case just because her parents say so.

And perhaps you could do us the favour of explaining this to Sineed for us as well? That we can't definitively say either way that it was caused by the cancer or by the treatment.

Sineed]</p> <p><strong>Chemotherapy versus death from cancer</strong></p> <p>[quote=Dr. David Gorski, oncologist wrote:

Yes, chemotherapy can make you feel nauseated and make you throw up. It can make your hair fall out. It can temporarily depress the immune system. It can cause bleeding complications, such as GI bleeding. It can cause kidney damage. It can cause heart damage. It can cause lung damage. It can cause nerve damage. It can make you lose weight. It can even result in your death from complications.....

My comments:

Thank you Dr. Gorski for being truthful.

I have repeatedly pointed out the inappropriateness and offensiveness of those who are posting here simply to grind home chemotherapy as the only treatment,  I don't understand why the moderators haven't intervened and moved this thread from this forum. Thank you jas for pointing it out also.

I also appreciated your comments Swallow regarding language.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

......

Meanwhile, is anyone even the tiniest bit surprised that her family would immediately, and with no specific evidence, insist that chemo killed her?  There's only one other thing they could blame, and that would be a pretty tough admission for any parent to make.

Yet another glaring example of why this thread should not be in this forum.

Mr. Magoo, I think it is very uncommon for an 11 year old or a thirteen year old girl to die from a stroke or a heart attack. Note: She did NOT die from her leukemia. It was a stroke. She had NO previous history of heart disease. After her chemo, her heart rate was twice the normal rate for a girl her age. This was said in the article to be a common symptom of chemotherapy. Since people with leukemia are automatically placed on chemo and there are no studies to isolate heart disease in people with leukemia who have NOT taken chemo because all people with her type of leukemia are treated with chemo, I think it is very safe to conclude that the long term chemo treatments damaged her heart and ultimately killed her. And until you can come up with definitive evidence otherwise, I think it be hooves you and others to show her parents the courtesy and respect to acknowledge their wisdom in their daughters affairs. To do otherwise is rude, offensive, and racist.

+1

Misfit wrote:

Mr. Magoo, I think it is very uncommon for an 11 year old or a thirteen year old girl to die from a stroke or a heart attack. Note: She did NOT die from her leukemia. It was a stroke. She had NO previous history of heart disease.

Quite often, when it comes to major sicknesses, there are major complications that arise and it's impossible to say for sure what one thing did or did not kill a person. For example, pneumonia and heart disease and stroke can often accompany serious blood disorders like leukemia. I'll also point out that people without an apparent history of heart disease often die suddenly from a heart attack or stroke, so that's not a reilable indicator either.

Misfit wrote:

Since people with leukemia are automatically placed on chemo and there are no studies to isolate heart disease in people with leukemia who have NOT taken chemo because all people with her type of leukemia are treated with chemo, I think it is very safe to conclude that the long term chemo treatments damaged her heart and ultimately killed her. And until you can come up with definitive evidence otherwise, I think it be hooves you and others to show her parents the courtesy and respect to acknowledge their wisdom in their daughters affairs. To do otherwise is rude, offensive, and racist.

The only surefire way to determine this would be to have a control group of leukemia patients not given any chemo, but with life or death at stake, such a study would be blatantly unethical.

Misfit wrote:

I think it be hooves you and others to show her parents the courtesy and respect to acknowledge their wisdom in their daughters affairs. To do otherwise is rude, offensive, and racist.

On the contrary, I think parents in general are mostly ignorant and unreliable when it comes to "their" children's affairs. That's why we have societies, which force all kinds of stuff on children even if their [s]owners[/s] parents aren't on board.

A legitimate question is, which society should have that power in the case of indigenous children. But let the parents choose? No thank you. Let the individual choose? I'd be far more comfortable with that.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

....

In other news, I'm totally chuffed that I can still make a few innocuous comments at the end of a three month old, 14 page thread and suddenly everything has gone to hell in a handbasket, the thread is now useless, there's no point in even living anymore, and Baby Jesus is bawling his eyes out in the corner.  I'VE STILL GOT IT, FOLKS!

 

Thank you for demonstrating exactly why I never joined the chorus hoping for your return. 

Quote:

Thank you for demonstrating exactly why I never joined the chorus hoping for your return.

You seem strangely familiar with me, despite apparently joining up here after I'd been long gone.

What was your previous screen name, rhubarb?  The one from back in the day.

I suppose a good question here is why is there so much distrust of the drug industry and their pushers in the the medical profession?

I can't help but have a feeling that this tragic medical situation is similiar to the energy sector where if we had spent even a fraction of the research into oil, into alternative forms of energy research we would long ago have lost our dependence on oil.

Sineed,

Quote:

then they would have no choice but to accept that it was the choice to abandon chemotherapy that doomed their daughter.

Sorry, I don't have a lot of knowledge on the subject but the above quote sounds like a drug commercial.

NorthReport wrote:

I suppose a good question here is why is there so much distrust of the drug industry and their pushers in the the medical profession?

There are a plenty of good reasons, and I consider myself one of those skeptical of the drug industry, and not inclined to blindly follow the directions of a doctor without asking a few questions.

But there is also a matter of common sense, and most people who use alternative and preventative medicines know when something happens and it is time to go to emergency, or to an MD.

Also, when you have representatives of the naturopathic medical college (as I posted above) pointing out what their field can and cannot do with respect to cancer care, and warning of the dangers of ending chemotherapy, it is pretty clear it is not simply us against the evil medical tyranny.

@Unionist, do you really think it is ok to assume that parents of a terminally ill child are so ignorant and stupid that they would not research what is best for their child and seek out questions from the medical community as to why their daughter has a rapid heart beat? People with severely sick children do not live in cocoons. please don't insult these parents' intelligence without suitable facts to do so.

And @Aristotled. I know for a fact that it is unethical to have a control and an experimental group with leukemia patients. That is why I said that 100% of leukemia patients have been given chemotherapy. The ones who were not were ones without access to medical treatment or who were able to successfully refuse the treatments on them. Having said that, I will reiterate that no one has the evidence to question or challenge that chemotherapy alone caused the heart disease. You said that many people with leukemia have heart problems. However you cannot claim that the leukemia alone causes heart problems when they all have chemotherapy and that chemotherapy causes heart problems.

She was being treated for her cancer...traditional First Nations methods. Why do you think her parents would lie?

Part of the issue is at what age is a person competent to make their own medical decisions. I think 10-11 is too young but obviously a judge gets to make this decision. I believe her parents fsailed to provide her the necessities of life.

Superior information and sophistication??? OMG~! And you also assume that they do not have a GP and a cardiologist? OMG~!

6079_Smith_W, your article assumes that western based allopathic medicine is superior to other medical treatment options with nothing to back up that bias.

MegB wrote:

Rhubarb and Misfit, stow the over-the-top hostility. It's ruining the thread.

ROTFLMAO

The fact that the girl is First Nations has nothing to do with the opinion any one here has of the medical decisions taken on her behalf.  If the head of the Toronto Sick Children's Hospital declared the Florida treatment as anything other than snake oil I would say that person should be removed from their position and checked out for brain tumors or other things that can cause the sudden onset of mental illness. That it is her mother making the decision does not bestow greater credibility on the Florida snake oil salesman. I am less likely to consider her suffering from some form of mental illness because I don't expect her to have the expertise of medical professionals and as a parent I know that if my daughter had a fatal the love I have for her would make me more susceptible to people promising me they could make her well.

In an interview the mother placed great faith in the Florida "doctor" when he guaranteed her that he can save her daughter's life. She specifically stated that she made her decision based on his promise. This is not a guarantee the hospital could legally make. So, Mom was choosing between two medical options, one in which the doctor could guarantee her daughter will live and not have to suffer chemo, opposed to another doctor who said he might be able to save her daughter but the treatment will make her sick for years.

What parent wouldn't choose the doctor that guarantees her daughter will definitely live and the treatment won't make her sick?

As an atheist I find it very difficult to understand how intelligent people can believe in a God or Gods but they do nonetheless, and many of them are far more brilliant and accomplished than I. So in a debate, who should people believe? Me, or the brilliant accomplished person with a string of degrees that can argue circles around me? How arrogant am I to insist that I am right and they are wrong? I can't even explain I am right, but I know that I am.

Formal education and world knowledge don't automatically make someone right and the most deprived person in the world with a non-academically trained mind can be right but not have the language to "prove" it the way "educated" people need things to be proven.

This argument is not about disrespecting FN medicine or disrespecting the mother as a FN woman. There are two core power issues involved, parental rights and sovereignty rights. In Canada the child's rights override parental rights and the state has an obligation to protect the child's rights if the parent fails to do so.

Some of us are arguing that the state's obligation to protect the child is not absolved by the child being FN. That child has just as much a right to protection as any other Canadian child. Indigeous Canadians do not have an autonomous country exempt from Canadian law. The most far-reaching treaties do not allow for Canadian law to be suspended anywhere. In my view this little girl is being denied her rights. She is being treated like a second-class citizen, as though her life is less valuable than the lives of non-indigenous children.

@ Pondering

But this was the girl's wishes, and CFS was following Ontario law in recognizing that. Getting beyond the legal conundrum (and I agree there is one here) I really don't think that there is a problem with runaway First Nations sovereignty creating death and a human rights crisis, and that our government needs to take back it's control over Native people, much as some concerned people might think so.

Not sure if there's quite the same concern in First Nations, though. I think we've had a few centuries of demonstration that the federal government still has a firm enough grip on things.

Personally, I think there is a lot about this beyond the technical points that concerns disrespect.

As an aside, you keep making reference to the mother. They were a family of three, as far as I know.

Unionist wrote:

A woman has a right to abort a foetus - because she has inalienable sovereignty over her body. Once the foetus is born, the mother - and father (if any) - should have no more rights - only obligations, imposed by a humane and clear-thinking society....

I just want to remove that right, and obligation, from parents. Because no individual should own another human being, nor should they control their destiny.

Agreed

Unionist wrote:

No, I don't know at what age we should entrust an individual with such decisions, nor do I know whether a uniform age can be determined in that regard. But it's a great question to put on the agenda.

I would say no particular age, as we do with older people, it depends on the individual situation. I read of one little girl, nine years old, that wanted to refuse treatment and her parents agreed. The hospital, rightly, fought them, and rightly lost. The girl had lived practically her entire life getting cancer treatments for different cancers. She wanted palliative care but it was right for the hospital to fight it and let the court decide. Hospitals should always err on the side of life.

Unionist wrote:

On the contrary, I think parents in general are mostly ignorant and unreliable when it comes to "their" children's affairs. That's why we have societies, which force all kinds of stuff on children even if their [s]owners[/s] parents aren't on board.

Slumberjack wrote:

there's been plenty of situations where these types of statements were applied hasn't there?

Quote:

I don't understand your question.

I'm referring to residential schools in particular as the most egregious example.  Because as the organizers of society a government will either enact broad and equally applicable policies in the best medical interests of young people at the expense of culture and religion, or it will pick and choose where to intervene, in which case selective discrimination is inevitable I would argue.  Will government have the right to impose a court order or change the law to ensure certain religious groups do not circumcise their infants, or include in such a law provisions to the effect that this procedure can only be performed with the informed consent of the individual, say at the age of 18 or 19.  Because if this is not to be the case, and I doubt something like this would come to pass, then any other intervention where children and medical procedures are concerned becomes an arbitrary undertaking, and we have to ask why that is.

Slumberjack wrote:

So at what age then should individual choice be respected?

Unionist wrote:

I don't know. What do you think? More importantly, what do you think of my main thesis, which is that parents should not be entrusted with such choices?

I don't know either.  As to your thesis, I'm fine with it in principle so long as we're not singling certain groups out for special 'concern.'  The minute they allow JW parents to withhold from their child a potentially life saving blood transfusion or inoculation, or make allowances for religious based circumcision, which is arguably a more direct form of abuse than parents withholding treatment from their children, then obviously questions around the selective nature of government interventions seems valid.

6079_Smith_W wrote:

@ Unionist

Except that again, parents AREN'T entrusted with those choices. They don't have any absolute rights regarding their children, and the court has the power to override those de facto ones which they do have.

Two arms of government decided in this case that they did not need to exercise that power. And this is not just a case about the parents' wishes.

Three arms of government, once you add in the Six Nations council. 

Sineed wrote:

.....

This message needs to be loud and clear. The other girl can still be saved.

 

And who will "save" her? 

Will the doctors return to court to challenge the court's decision?

Makayla Sault's mother said that an oncologist suggested that First Nations children may not respond to chemotherapy in the same way as other children who are treated with chemotherapy, is this possible? 

We all know that once cancer is diagnosed we are very ill,  but is it possible that in some cases although we are ill we may not actually have cancer, the testing is not infallible.  I ask whether some may survive a treatment they did not need and then are called success stories by the cancer industry?  It goes to the matter of trust, I know people misdiagnosed who were abused for wanting a second, third and fourth opinion.

I am grateful that very few, if any, First Nations peoples are exposed to the blatant disrespect for them that has been demonstrated repeatedly on this thread.   Babble is irrelevent to them, they know colonialism when they see it and they know that colonialism is just another word for racism. 

From Connie Walker at the CBC:

Quote:

While those in the courtroom debated the validity of indigenous medicine, J.J. and her mother were in the most un-indigenous place I've ever been to: West Palm Beach, Fla., at the Hippocrates Health Institute. 

It was a place J.J.’s mother was convinced was better for her daughter than any Canadian hospital.

In fact, it was the mother who urged me to look into Hippocrates. She felt we in the media were focusing too much on the indigenous medicine and not enough on the "comprehensive treatment plan" she had chosen. 

J.J., whose family opted out of chemotherapy for alternative treatment, received IV vitamin therapy at the Hippocrates Health Institute.

It was a deliberate choice. Her mother told me that as soon as her daughter was diagnosed, she knew she wanted to send her to Hippocrates, which she had first heard about it through a family friend. 

But at first she didn't have the thousands of dollars it costs to attend Hippocrates. So she started the chemo even while saying she didn't feel right about it.

Quote:

As a First Nations person myself, I'm confident I can say that none of my ancestors abided by a strict raw vegan diet, or took high doses of vitamins intravenously or underwent cold laser technology. Regardless, her mother said Hippocrates was in line with her belief in natural medicine.

Quote:

I interviewed Koster in May. In his office, he showed me the hutch filled with First Nations artifacts he's collected over the years of working in child welfare. 

He said it was the Child and Family Services Act that required them to "respect First Nations culture" and he "couldn't even begin to think" about removing her from a caring family environment and forcing her into chemo. 

I can understand this logic. I know, first hand, the impact that previous child welfare policies and the after-effects of residential schools have had on our communities.

But is this really the same situation? Isn't this more about two girls having the same rights to be protected as other kids in Canada?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/aboriginal/makayla-sault-s-death-shifts-the-spotl...