Dr. Weeks’ Comment: Is chemo the best option for a child with cancer? Many medical doctors would say “No!” and make the claim that, in many instances, chemotherapy itself is more dangerous than cancer.
Listen to Alan Nixon, past president of the American Chemical Society, saying: “As a chemist who is trained to interpret data, it’s comprehensible to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence that chemotherapy does much much more harm than good.” Or listen to Dr. Alan Levine at UCSF: “Most patients in this country die of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon, or lung cancer. This fact has been documented for over a decade, yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumors.” Or how about the words of Professor John Karen’s published in Scientific American 1985: “A 6 or 12 month course of chemotherapy not only is very unpleasant to experience, but also has its own intrinsic mortality. Not morbidity, mortality. Treatments now avert probably 2 or 3% of the 400,000 deaths from cancer that occur each year.”
Finally, Prof. Max Wicha, M.D. now advisor to the National Cancer Advisory Board states unequivically that “chemotherapy and radiation make your cancer worse.”
Yet the State doesn’t respect parental rights and eviscerates freedom of choice in health care and is itself now practicing medicine.
My friend Dr. Garry Gordon writes: “We’ve all heard more recent judgements of jail for a parent like this mother for not giving their autistic fragile child with lymphoma his prescribed Chemo. This is government out of control. How can they prove that the chemo would not have killed him faster? Yet, in this case, a single mom with no resources fearing to end her son’s life by giving him chemo she knew he could not handle faced 20 years in jail.”
Tue Apr 12, 2011 12:55pm EDT
Mother who withheld medicine guilty of attempted murder
BOSTON
The mother of an autistic boy with cancer was found guilty on Tuesday of attempted murder for withholding chemotherapy drugs that potentially could have saved his life.
A jury found Kristen LaBrie, 38, of Salem, Massachusetts guilty on all counts — attempted murder, permitting serious bodily injury to a disabled person, permitting substantial injury to a child and reckless endangerment of a child, said Steve O’Connell, spokesman for the Essex District Attorney’s Office.
Her son, Jeremy Fraser, died at age 9 in March 2009. He was autistic and in 2006 was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
During her trial, LaBrie admitted she failed to fill the prescriptions or administer chemotherapy drugs to her son during at least five months but said she did so out of fear the medication would make him sicker.
She said she told his doctors that the medication’s side effects were taking a toll on him.
“I was really scared that he just had had it,” she testified. “He was just not capable of getting through any more chemotherapy…. He was very, very fragile.”
“I did not want to have to make him get any more sick,” she told the court. “If he got any sicker than he was, I thought he would die, and I thought that he would die with me at home.”
In February 2008, doctors realized she was not giving her son the medication and that the cancer had returned. In April of that year, Jeremy’s father was given custody of the boy.
Prosecutors said LaBrie did not try hard enough to see her son or regain custody before he died.
But the defense portrayed LaBrie as a single mother raising an autistic child with cancer with limited financial resources and without much support.
Judge Richard Welch will sentence LaBrie on Friday in Lawrence Superior Court. She faces the possibility of up to 20 years in prison for attempted murder, the stiffest charge.
The maximum sentence is 10 years in prison for permitting serious bodily injury to a disabled person, and the other two charges carry a maximum prison term of five years each.
(Reporting by Lauren Keiper and Marcia Harrison, editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and Greg McCune)