Hocus-Pocus or Science?

"The family has always acknowledged that mainstream medicine was one of its options. But there are good reasons why they made the decisions they made, and I don't think any of them are mistakes."
"[As the girl's cancer returned, the family decided that] chemotherapy, along with traditional Haudenosaunee [Iroquois] medicine, which 'J.J.' had already been receiving, would be the next best step."
"The two paths of medicine began working together in a respectful and complex way."
Paul Williams, Six Nations parents' lawyer

"The fact that the parents have agreed to chemotherapy, along with traditional Haudenosaunee medicine, means that the child has a chance to live."
Juliet Guichon, bioethicist, lawyer, University of Calgary

Supporters, outside a Brantford, Ont., courtroom, of the girl, known as J.J, and her mother, known as D.H., cheered when Justice Gethin Edward concluded the family’s aboriginal rights trumped the hospital’s attempts to compel child-welfare authorities to intervene and send J.J. back to the hospital for chemotherapy.The Globe and Mail

It could be interpreted as losing face within the aboriginal community when decisions such as that expressed by two families whose young daughters were diagnosed with leukemia decided to take them out of the hospital where they were receiving conventional medical treatment for childhood leukemia in favour of alternate treatments, not only traditional First Nations medicines, but taking them to the establishment of a medical pretender, a charlatan in Florida for treatment consisting of vegan, raw-foods, herbs and grasses, much like the aboriginal pharmacopoeia.

One of the little girls succumbed to the final morbid effects of her condition. The second little girl known only by the court-protected initials of "J.J." was in remission, her family crowing that the alternate treatment had worked, where the chemotherapy had only made her condition worse. Now, however, the cancer has returned, and with it the realization must have dawned that she too would die like the first child whose parents had claimed the chemotherapy had been responsible for her death, months after she had been removed from it, and placed under alternate therapy.

The aboriginal judge who had ruled that the family was within their constitutional rights to take their child out of conventional medical treatment back in November has now agreed to alter his decision at the request of the lawyers involved. Justice Gethin Edward's finding was modified to emphasize that a child's best interests must always be paramount in such situations, although traditional treatments should still be respected.

 Since scientifically proven evidence makes it clear enough that between 70 and 90 percent of child leukemia cases can be cured with conventional treatment including chemotherapy, and that without such intervention death is inevitable, it takes no genius to decide for convention over trial.

Lost in all of this was the pleading by the pediatric oncologists at McMaster Childrens Hospital for the child to remain in chemotherapy, that they were not averse to her receiving traditional aboriginal medications alongside the chemotherapy. Doctors at the Hamilton hospital fought to have the child given the treatment they knew could save her life; they didn't strive to restrain her family from additionally exposing her to aboriginal treatment. The parents had rejected their pleas, snubbing their noses at chemotherapy, cleaving instead to the promise of a Florida man who claimed to have been the salvation of patients with advanced cancers.

TOM BLACKWELL/NATIONAL POST   Hayley Doxtater examines some of the traditional medicines available at Ancestral Voices Healing Centre on Six Nations reserve. The community is embroiled in a court dispute over a girl who has refused chemotherapy for leukaemia.