What do you think?

[HeartRN]

http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/stor ... wire_story

I think it's an incredibly sad, slippery slope. It's so hard to see past others personal beliefs when the obvious smart choice is staring you in the face. I think she should receive treatment - but how terrifying to go through that with strangers. And where do we draw the line about what treatment the state says your kids must have? I believe vaccinations are the right choice - but not all parents do. Should the state be able to make parents vaccinate their children?

I honestly do not have a firm stance on this one. It's too murky.

[Cumberland]

I think that the courts have ignored that the parents are acting in the best interest of their child. They want to pursue alternative medical therapies and the state has viewed it as abuse. Cancer tx is so uncertain that there cant be only one way.

This one too personal for me to be objective on.
A friend of mine has Hodgkins, diagnosed a year ago.
Six months ago her teenage daughter was diagnosed.
My friend is putting her own recovery at risk to make sure her daughter gets well.
She is putting her childs life before her own.

[DCJenn]

I had a similar situation with one of my clients a few years back. One of my staff discovered (she was bathing my client in the shower and for some reason was helping her wash her feet and looked up and saw the underneath part of her breast) that one of my clients had the breast cancer that starts off looking like orange peel. We rushed her to the doc who diagnosed it and of course the biopsy came back positive. BUT this woman was severely autistic and tactile defensive (the only clothes we could get her to wear were nightgowns- the big flowy kind, granny panties a size too big and occasionally a loose fitting t-shirt).

What to do? Chemo and radiation? In someone who couldn't stand clothes? She'd have to have been sedated- plus it was the super aggressive kind of cancer and the oncologist recommended really aggressive (i.e. daily) treatments. So, in one of the most amazing things I have ever seen, her mom decided on palliative care only because to sedate her every day wasn't worth the trauma to her and the risks of that level of sedation. (she always took a ton of meds to knock out)

So, from August until November, we provided her care in concert with the local hospice group who sent us nurses as needed. She died right after thanksgiving and was buried at Arlington National Cemetary with her dad who was a Naval officer.

Sometimes it's kinder to pursue other kinds of treatments, or as in this case, none at all. But I'm sure there's some group out there who would have protested had anyone known.

jenn

I have heard about this specific case before and my memory about it is fuzzy. As with many things like this, I suppose there might be more to the story. I think I saw the family on TV and was struck by their genuine concern about the harm of the treatments (not that theirs was the right choice). I thought there wasn't such a clear benefit of the radiation (80% survival part).
My feeling is that more patients should question what is recommended, particularly questioning quality of life issues and success of cancer treatment. My biases run deep on this, based on some of what we went through with my FIL.

In this case, I just really don't know. I do feel certain that removing her from her family home and the stress of that was not in her best interest either. Harder to say with the treatment.

[Rapunzel]

I remember this case. The weird thing was that the judge took the daughter in question away from her parents ALONG with her younger, perfectly healthy, brother. It kind of made the court's reasoning (ie to provide health care for the daughter) a bit of a ruse since the brother didn't need health care and had no signs of abuse or neglect (actually, neither child showed signs of abuse or conventional neglect at all).

Jennifer