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<p>Alternative treatments have never been proven to be anything more than placebos. </p>
<p>(And placebos don’t just have to be inactive pills … the whole process of going through a treatment, getting injected, etc. can release signals that mediate a placebo effect.)</p>
<p>Galoisien, that is not true. There are many folks who have had good results from alternative treatments. They just don’t have the consistency and predictability of those protocols that have been tested scientifically. I have personally known of tumor decreases and disease reduction from such treatments. I still would not recommend them unless there are no other alternatives, because they have a much, much lower rate of success and often have miniscule rate of keeping the disease away. However, there are times when they can work. The odds are just very poor.</p>
<p>The young man, Billy Best, whose Hodgkins lymphoma had returned was able to go back into remission with alternative treatments only and he has been disease free for 7 years now. I know of other singular cases of the sort, and numerous cases where disease was kept at bay or decreased by alternative treatments, for a while. Lasting results are very rare, and even more rare are times when you can isolate what exactly caused the remission since more folks combine alternative treatments with standard meds. However, I have seen the lab writeups of the results of some tumor diminishment with some of these alternative agents. There just are many other medical things that work much better, have a better chance of working at all and are more predictable.</p>
<p>If success is so rare, how can you claim that it is anything other than spontaneous remission?</p>
<p>Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. That people occasionally get better after trying alternative treatments does not mean the alternative treatments are working in any sort of mechanistic sense.</p>
<p>There’s no evidence that alternative treatments are what’s actually causing the cancer to go into remission. The NIH has set up an entire institute to investigate complementary and alternative medicine, and after several years of investigation, there are perilously few confirmations of alternative treatments being efficacious.</p>
<p>I am of mixed feelings about this.
I don’t feel we can dictate to normal intelligent parents how to raise their kids.</p>
<p>We don’t require them to serve only organic food, research each individual vaccine and live in the areas with the best schools. We allow them ( in many areas) to serve alcohol to their minor children at home, to have wiis & televisions in their bedrooms * again in many areas* ;), and to be exposed to stupid adults at family reunions.</p>
<p>I haven’t read the articles cause my internet is slow.
If a child for instance is homeschooled, there should be accountability measures in place to ascertain if the person instructing them is competent and if they are making progress ( at least as much as if they were in public school- again 
)
If they are not- then optimally there would be a structure to place them in public school.</p>
<p>If a child cannot read by thirteen, I expect there is a great more that is happening than that they are being homeschooled, my older daughter taught herself to read at three, for example & even though my younger daughter is dyslexic, she read by eight.</p>
<p>We do allow children of this age to make decisions in other areas. Fourteen for example is I believe the age at which the medical provider has to speak directly to the patient, they won’t speak to the parent.
I also know that courts have determined 12 year olds, to be judged as an adult in cases of murder, even when the child was mentally disabled as well.</p>
<p>I don’t like it- but I think it is difficult to pick and chose how we are going to treat minor children.
In some states we don’t allow even 16 year olds to obtain birth control without their parents knowledge, even if that parent is/may be abusive.</p>
<p>If parents are intelligent and caring I think we can assume they love their children and are doing the best they can by them.</p>
<p>The Travoltas son who recently died for example, may have had a syndrome which could have been helped by another style of treatment- but no one doubts that they did what they felt was right & they can’t be judged negligent.</p>
<p>I don’t know this family, and they very well might be wacko- certainly on edge and when people are under pressure they often make bad decisions.</p>
<p>Obviously I don’t have any answers- but I think we do need to put structures in place regarding this- because as medical technology advances, diseases will be identified earlier- perhaps even before symptoms & this is going to come up again.</p>
<p>This type cancer is apparently very treatable even in late stages with radiation, survival rate still in the 90%.
It’s apparently non Hodgkins that is more difficult.
[Man</a> Who Fought Chemo Would Help Fleeing Boy - Boston News Story - WCVB Boston](<a href=“http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/19547574/detail.html]Man”>http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/19547574/detail.html)</p>
<p>^Indeed. All neoplasms are not created equal.</p>
<p>“no one doubts that they did what they felt was right & they can’t be judged negligent.”</p>
<p>I agree that they did what they felt was right, but I still judge them negligent.</p>
<p>::::::::wince:::::::
well they didn’t handle it the way I would have- but I still wouldn’t want the state to step in and declare that they didn’t have the right to proceed according to their beliefs/decision- after all, who know what the state would say about * my parenting*</p>
<p>I, like E-kitty have mixed feelings about this situation, but mine are a bit less charitable.
As a conservative and a Christian, I fell very strongly about freedom of religion and freedom FROM religion - I don’t want the government telling me how to practice my beliefs, or anyone else. I believe prayer can work miracles, BUT I also believe that God’s plan undergirds the miracles of modern medicine. I think parents should raise their children as they wish, without interference, unless their “raising” puts the child in danger of lasting bodily harm.
Of course where all these competing duties collide is where we as a free society run into problems.
My first thought was that the authorities need to do something - this is tumor with a 90% cure rate with relatively low side effects (key word relatively) not a 30% chance of survival with many toxic effects, this is a 13 year old, not an 17 year old, and the child can’t even read at 13, his decision making skills may not even be normal for a 13 year old. These parents are stupid!
Sadly though, kids die of stupid parents quite frequently, more than are injured by malicious neglect. Brittany Spears driving with the baby in her lap comes to mind, as does some stupid things I did with my kids. I think we as a free society may need to let that Mom make her stupid decisions, even though Daniel will pay for them.
to the Mom - bring your son home, he has a 90% chance of living after the chemo and a 90% chance of dying without it. Give him all the alternative therapy you want to, heck, you can even say that the alternative therapy is what saved him… just get him his chemo as well. Please, for his sake.</p>
<p>re: alternative treatments. think of any, they’ll be debunked here, including the occasional positive result.</p>
<p>[Topical</a> Index - Alternative Medicine - The Skeptic’s Dictionary - Skepdic.com](<a href=“http://www.skepdic.com/tialtmed.html]Topical”>Topical Index - Alternatives to Medicine - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com)</p>
<p>In particular look at the one for acupuncture (and sham acupuncture). Note: acupuncture has proven to be effective. But someone pretending to do acupuncture can induce the same effects (at the same magnitude), even reliably so. Again it really probably has to do more with the release of endorphins, neurotransmitters, homeostatic hormones, from the psychological and physiological stimulation (especially the confidence in an ancient Asian “art”, cue fancy silken walls, and the continual reinforcement). I mean, it almost seems kind of obvious, because my AP Bio textbook mentions nothing about hidden chi pathways (or is that the electron transport chain in disguise???) </p>
<p>Did I mention, physiological conditioning. If you’ve been conditioned to feel a high (and not feel pain) every time you get jabbed with morphine, someone can jab you with saline solution, tell you it’s morphine, and reproduce the effects. And so if you get conditioned to feel positive effects with alternative “medicine”…</p>
<p>Again, it’s often not really the alternative medicine itself, but just the power of the placebo effect. This can be a niche that “traditional” medicine can exploit – but the thing is, do we want doctors lying to their patients to make them feel better?</p>
<p>Often really it’s the confidence. Traditional medicine is grim – morbid details of metastasis and drugs, ion channels, induced apoptosis and angiogenetic factors – the truth, but the gross truth. Quackery has confidence. Will HAVE an effect! SAVE your child! Greater confidence reduces stress hormones on the body; stress hormones undermine the immune system – and the immune system is critical in making chemotherapy work (via induced apoptosis). Result: an effectively attacked cancer. The quackery is all a lie, but a lie that can work. A new approach could combine a lie (within ethical limits) coupled with the truth (the real treatment) for maximum effect. I think a doctor once prescribed (fake) antibiotics to a patient facing a viral infection. The patient’s ignorance allowed him to believe that antibiotics work against viral infections (they don’t), and recovered more quickly than normal. Of course, we can’t say for sure that the fake antibiotics did anything, but it’s quite suggestive. Of course, is this practice something we want practiced? Maybe it would be covered in an ethics course in med school or something.</p>
<p>^It is covered in med school.</p>
<p>This is troubling case to me. On one hand, I would love to make others raise kids my way. This boy is underage, and vulnerable. This appears to be a life or death situation, and it is hard to sit back and watch the parents do something so contrary to what society accepts. The high survival rate plays into it. At what survival rate percentage would it be okay to refuse treatment?</p>
<p>And then I think about places like China, where medical procedures are forced on people who don’t want them (eg. abortion). We already accept many “forced” medical treatments, such as immunizations. There is some sort of benefit/harm ratio used to decide these things, I guess, but I don’t know what it is. </p>
<p>The religion issue is tougher. On the one hand, who am I to limit God’s interactions with someone else based on whether or not I believe it? Should my lack of faith be enough to stop someone else? Religious freedom, like most freedoms, generally stops at the point that it affects someone else’s “alive-ness” (saying “life” didn’t work in that sentence, since parents DO have the right to affect their children’s lives, religiously or otherwise). And therefore, I believe the parents’ religious freedom does not extend to a point that may cost the child his life.</p>
<p>I feel like I’ve seen cases before where Christian Science practitioners have been taken to court over treating their children. Or Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose children need blood transfusions. I don’t know how the courts have ruled, though.</p>
<p>One point that I haven’t seen mentioned (but I may have missed it) is that not everyone considers death the worst thing that could happen. There are times when I think that when I get to heaven, God will say, “Why did you fight coming here so much?”</p>
<p>Personally from a libertarian standpoint I think religious freedom is superfluous. You can believe whatever you want to believe, preach whatever you want to preach, go to church wherever you want to go to church (or go to a mosque, temple, or to no place of worship at all). This comes with freedom of speech, assembly, thought, right of self-ownership…so religious freedom follows from all of these things.</p>
<p>Religious freedom does not mean religious neutrality, or passivism towards quackery. You can believe whatever crackpot stuff you want to believe, and you can test it in the free marketplace of ideas, but you don’t have a right to force it on other people, like an innocent child who wouldn’t know better, or to use it as an excuse to introduce creationist quackery into the science classroom.</p>
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<p>Well said.</p>
<p>I’m simply not convinced that it is just small step from overriding a parents wish to let their child die of a disease with a 90% cure rate to the government storming through my door to judge my parenting.</p>
<p>Additionally, this child was told he was not ill. His parents lied to him. That is exactly the type of situation when the state should step in.</p>
<p>There are religions that refuse transfusions. When life threatening, the state immediately steps in and forces the issue. It is a difficult situation, especially involving kids old enough to have some control over his treatment.</p>
<p>Billy Best and Daniel Hauser both were dxed Hodgkins Lymphoma. Like Hauser, Best was told that his tumor was growing even after the chemo regiments. He had had enough and ran away. When he returned, he was treated with alternative regiments. He is still alive today. </p>
<p>Before a cancer protocol is considered standard, it has to go through rigorous clinical trial testing. If an agent is not an improvement over other agents still being used, it does not become part of the new protocols. However, that does not mean that it was an absolute dud. There often are some kids who did react positively to the agent. Just not enough, and not just as effectively as the standard protocols. So there are some folks out there that will have some effects from some of the alternative stuff. I would not want to have to pick from those alternatives, but there are people who are so against the standard medical protocols, that they are willing to take that chance. The vast majority of them do not survive but there are some who do. </p>
<p>Most of the time, however, there has been some standard meds used as well, so it’s hard to say what caused the remission.</p>
<p>I know a man who was a burn patient with life threatening 2nd and third degree burns. He underwent a truly traumatic experience. Ten years later, he still maintains that wishes that he had died rather than go through what he did. Not that he is unhappy with his life, but because it was just so painful that it was not worth it for him to undergo it. He was forced to do so. </p>
<p>Most kids absolutely do not want to go through horrible medical treatment and there are many times when they have to be forced. I have heard those terrible screams many times, and still do in my nightmares. The good news is that we are saving most of the children who are diagnosed with cancer, but the treatment can be brutal. If you left it up to the kids, you would often not even get a diagnosis as a bone marrow aspirate and biopsy is not something kids usually agree to undergo. It can hurt like getting a nail hammered into your back. It’s a tough situation even with the parents fully agreeing to the process. I don’t think there is a parent I know who went through this experience with a child who has not thought about ending the whole danged thing at times. Especially when the treatment is not working despite the misery of the side effects which was the case with Daniel.</p>
<p>My son had a non Hodgkins lymphoma–Stage 4 lymphoblastic lymphoma and acute lymphocytic leukemia with poor presenting features. It was a terrible feeling when I would be told by so many people how curable lymphoma and leukemia were, when I well knew that those on his protocol had about an expected 52% 5 year event free survival.</p>
<p>I am so sorry for what you and your child went through. That is a pain I just cannot imagine. </p>
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<p>What do you mean the treatment was not working? His doctors, and the two other opinions the parents sought out, recommended six rounds of chemotherapy and radiation. Daniel stopped after one round.</p>
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<p>It really depends on the type of chemotherapy you use. Healthy cells obey apoptotic signals better than cancerous ones: after all, they are “loyal”. So that’s why healthy epithelial cells usually take such a hit. The treatment is being improved: now there are chemo treatments that rely less on the targeted cells still retaining whatever normal tumor-suppressive genes it might still have (e.g. p53) and more of what would distinguish cancerous cells from normal growing tissue (e.g. abnormal proteins). Some tumors happen to be so mutated that they are effectively immune to the type of chemotherapy you use – they don’t respond to the chemo at all. You need good doctors to pick this up and switch to a different course of drugs.</p>
<p>Part of the issue is that sometimes a full force of chemotherapy regimens are issued against a mature cancer. Think antibiotics: you kill the least resistive cells – the more normal cells die. So there becomes a microevolutionary selective pressure AGAINST the more normal cells in the tumor. The most rebellious cells survive the chemotherapy and succeed the next generation. Wide-spectrum chemotherapy is not the most optimal treatment for cancer indeed. They are very good for early-stage cancer, because the cells probably haven’t accumulated many mutations (being the product of only so many unchecked generations) so they obey most signals. They are not really good at late-stage cancer, but they get prescribed anyway because doctors feel the need to be “drastic” and to put in all their chips. Sometimes you need doctors with judgment. </p>
<p>Thankfully, medicine knows its limits and will admit its failures. It’s honest. It’s also open to self-correction, and additional research (like better forms of chemotherapy). There are new methods in the works and I expect to see them deployed soon. </p>
<p>The quackery of alternative medicine? Nah. They’re arrogant. They think they’re infallible, or that every disease can fall under their theory. Their only redeeming feature is their confidence, that allows healing via placebo effect. </p>
<p>Better: integrate the confidence of quackery … without the quackery. And couple it with an actual treatment.</p>
<p>And to answer another question: really the decision on when you should be allowed to “switch” should be less about the survival rates than the stage of cancer you are at (just happens that survival rate correlates with maturity of said cancer). Wide-spectrum (nonspecific) chemotherapy is less effective on mature cancers (for microevolutionary reasons explained above), so the placebo effect can sometimes do more good (and cause the body less harm). Doesn’t actually mean any of the alternative treatments actually work – just their confidence.</p>
<p>Apparently Daniel and his mother returned to Minnesota earlier today and Daniel was admitted to a hospital to be re-evaluated…</p>
<p>[Attorney:</a> Daniel returns, taken for check-up](<a href=“http://www.startribune.com/45990387.html?elr=KArks7PYDiaK7DUvDE7aL_V_BD77:DiiUiacyKU7DYaGEP7vDEh7P:DiUs]Attorney:”>http://www.startribune.com/45990387.html?elr=KArks7PYDiaK7DUvDE7aL_V_BD77:DiiUiacyKU7DYaGEP7vDEh7P:DiUs)</p>