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Thursday, August 17, 2006
Newsflash - Child of hippies allowed to make stupid decision.
Starchild Abraham Cherrix has won his appeal and may choose to take alternative medicine to treat his Hodkin's lymphoma.
To those unfamiliar with this case, it's pretty straightforward. He's a 16 year old kid, relapsing from previous allopathic treatment of his cancer, that wanted to instead try using a completely debunked alternative treatment called the Hoxsey method. This generated a good bit of discussion over at respectful insolence one of several excellent blogs over at scienceblogs. Now Orac, who wrote the post, favored the original decision, in which the state decided to take custody from the parents and create joint custody with child protective services so the kid would be forced to take chemo. I didn't, and think it violated existing ethical guidelines on consent in minors. There's a lot of room to disagree here, but I'm curious to think what other Give Upers think. My reasoning is simple.
This kid will certainly die from this quack cure. That's his decision, I'm fine with it. He's old enough, and the decision only hurts himself. Anyone else have an opinion? And am I the only one who sees this as the natural outcome of hippies raising kids and naming them things like "starchild"? |
9 Comments:
Would you feel differently if the parents were Christian Scientists, and the son wanted to forgo treatment on his own?
10:52 PM, August 16, 2006
That is, this hippie alternative shit may be a form of brainwashing where the kid is just mimicking the parent's idiotic beliefs...This case may not be that different from a religious coercion situation.
10:56 PM, August 16, 2006
It depends on the age of the kid. If Christian Scientists were denying obviously beneficial care to a kid under the age of about 13, then yes, they are negligent. If a 16-year-old Christian Scientist wanted to deny medical care to himself/herself, then that is their choice.
I'm drawing from the ethical guidelines of the American Pediatric Association, they basically say, once a kid is old enough to have sex, bear children, emancipate themselves, take care of themselves, etc., it's time that they enjoy at the very least, consent before medical treatment is given. Certainly by the age of 16, they are given more or less full autonomy over their bodies.
I think it's a good thing, no matter how bad the decisions they make are, we simply shouldn't use that as a measure of autonomy.
12:35 AM, August 17, 2006
One of the more amusing part of our medical ethics class was the take-home message. It basically went: "if the patient agrees with you, no matter how crazy the idea, fine. Do it. But if they disagree with you, they must not have control of their mental faculties and require a psych consult to overturn their decision."
I seem to recall that the professors/ethicists didn't have a good alternative to calling the shrinks every time someone didn't want some (often unpleasant) treatment.
In this kid's case, yeah, I think he's old enough to decide. But I can't really imagine that he fully understands the consequences - most 16 year olds are still invincible. Then again, it sounds like the chemo was incredibly miserable, and perhaps he'd rather die that go through that again.
9:27 AM, August 17, 2006
Would you feel the same way if the kid was your brother or your son?
11:12 AM, August 17, 2006
Why should it matter if it's your brother, son, father, mother, third cousin, or some stranger on the street? If you agree that someone, above a certain age, is competent to decide for themselves whether they want a particular treatment or not, how can you override the decision as to what they do? Try to persuade, sure, but flat-our force them to do something against their will?
11:37 AM, August 17, 2006
I think it's impossible to judge these situations generally. You have to look at it case by case.
Here in SF, there is significant controversy surrounding suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge. A study panel was just commissioned to investigate whether a net can be installed on teh bridge to catch the jumpers.
Perhaps 1200 people have jumped. At times, it was kind of a fad--the newspapers would run a counter on the front page, and as it came closer to round numbers, more and more people jumped.
A few dozen actually survived. Some say that in retrospect, they were depressed and not fit to decide to kill themselves...
So, I don't want to stand in the way of a person's knowing, and carefully considered attempt at suicide. But how can one discriminate generally between those who are qualified to make the decision and those who are not? It's not age that makes the difference...
1:34 PM, August 17, 2006
When the child dies, the parents will say that the Government should have stepped if the therapy was truly quackery. "There ought to be a law."
Follow up is needed on this one.
He did get one course of chemo and there is a slim chance that he may survive.
4:33 PM, August 17, 2006
The government already has said the therapy he wanted, the Hoxsey therapy, is quackery. In fact, he had to go to Mexico to get the treatments. There's a bad sign by the way. If you travel to Sweden for a treatment, that's fine, but when you have to go south of the border, and your clinic is next to a donkey show, you have to wonder about the wisdom of your course of action.
Anyway, the government couldn't do much more other than take the child away from the parents, who supported his decision. It would have been an entirely different issue if the parents were also against the kid's decision, but they weren't. They helped him on this insane course.
Further, this kid isn't depressed or mentally ill. You can not use any legitimate argument to take away his autonomy, the only thing his docs can say is that they don't like his decision. That's just not good enough.
5:02 PM, August 17, 2006
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