According to WKOW out of nearby Madison, Wisconsin, Brown County Judge John Rodenberg, the same judge who last week ordered 13-year old Daniel to undergo chemotherapy to treat his Hodgkin's Lymphoma, issued an arrest warrant for Daniel's mom Colleen Hauser after she—and Daniel—failed to show up for a hearing.
So now the family has reverted to taking their child on the lam. When will all this end? Or put more soberly, how will it all end?
Personally it's hard to see this with a happy ending, no matter what the resulting scenario.
Should Daniel die, it will be an avoidable tragedy. What will his parents say then? How will they be treated in the community? Will the state of Minnesota have the courage to carry through with prosecuting them? I wouldn't wish the horrific notion of losing a child on anyone, and I don't want to see it happen here.
Should he live, and seem to get better, I fear an entire sub-culture of quacks and bogus cure peddlers will seize on it as a victory over so mighty an institution of modern medicine as the Mayo Clinic (where he was initially treated). I fear this because they will claim it without the slightest bit of clinical evidence as to how his body recovered; I fear this because they will falsely win over populations of cancer patients and their families, who are already vulnerable, and who will stop ongoing treatments or cancel future ones and put their lives in extreme jeopardy.
To those who respond by saying that perhaps whatever kept the cancer from killing him is a true 'cure' that I would be advocating be squashed, I say simply this: OK, if it IS a 'cure', then allow it to be subjected to the rigors of the scientific method. Don't keep it tied up in spiritual hogwash.
Recently his mother who, like the entire family, claims to be both Catholic and part of the Native American Organization Nemenhah Band, made the following claim about their actions: "It is our religious freedom and right to do this."
This kind of rhetoric is standard among virtually all religious groups in America when they want to assert the kinds of rights that they themselves typically try to deny to other groups, with few displaying this repugnant morality more egregiously or consistently than the Catholics.
Bring this kid back, lady. Don't make him yet another victim of profoundly fatal religious ignorance.
Sources:
Story from station WKOW.
Lymphomainfo.net write-up on Hodgkin's Lymphoma
Summary of the story at The Huffington Post
Really Ross, do you know what
Really Ross, do you know what you're talking about?
I am a two time cancer survivor. The first was Hodgkins (stage 2a)at the age of 18. When diagnosed, we were led from doctor to doctor who told us what the treatment modalities would be. Our primary source of information of the time was a Merck Manual and the doctors. So, we did what traditional medicine told us to do. Even though I had no other traces of cancer post surgery, I underwent radiation therapy over the thoracic, mantle & abdomin that reached LIFE TIME Rad maximums! Long-term risks were not discussed or even mentioned.
I followed up as suggested for 5 years post treatment, and discussed with every doctor I ever visited my medical history. At NO time during or after my treatement was this explained to me or my parents that this treatment would QUADRUPLES the risk of breast cancer (in males and females)over the next 20-30 years!
21 years later I found a lump in my right breast. After arguing with a Radiologist who told me to "you're under 40 it's probably nothing...come back in 6 months" because he couldn't see anything on an ultrasound of a lump that was both palpable and visable my OB/GYN who knew my medical history ordered a biopsy. Surprise! I was diagnosed with Breast Cancer! When I met with my surgeon (1 of 3)she took ONE look at my chart and said "OH, you had Hodgkins. Did you have radiation over the mantle area?". Five weeks later I had a double masectomy to removed my affected breast and to decrease the risk of occurance in my second breast. At that time, I had 1 cancerous lymph node and I chose to pursue traditional methods after exploring all of my options and educating myself on the risks. I met with 3 teams of doctors and created a great deal of discomfort by questioning EVERY recomendation before I made my final decision about surgery & treatment. I underwent 6 rounds of chemotherapy that have now weakened my heart and caused other problems. IT WAS MY CHOICE BASED ON MY RESEARCH!
6 weeks after I completed my breast cancer treatment, I had problems with my thyroid and had to have it removed for fear of MORE cancer also related to the radiation I received for my Hodgkins! Luckily, my thyroid was NOT cancerous but, now I have to undergo a lifetime of thyroid replacement treatment.
What's my point? EVERY treatment has residual effects--some more extreme than others, some with some reasearch could probably be eliminated. NOW there is a great deal of information available to educate people on treatments and risks. Dispite the fact that this child is 13 and couldn't read his own afidavit(according to the court documents), the implication that the Mother speaks for this boy in all appointments, and their understandable fears of the effects of chemotherapy. She is in fact the parent and even at 18 I didn't know what questions to ask the doctor and, the doctors often blew me off when I asked questions! I applaud her for seeking out alternatives!
I firmly believe that the majority of parents in the world want what is best for their child. I have a hard time beleiving that this boy's mother would conciously put her child in harms way even though she is being shrouded as some overly zelous, uber-spritual quack with undereducated children. (Really? Do we have ALL of the facts about that?)
This family's "Why" is quite frankly none of our business nor is it the court's business. The fact that the court is imposing traditional medical modalities on this child is overstepping the bounds of the court. What if the judge believed in non-traditional treatment and ordered the family to seek out alternative treatments? Can you imagine the comments then?
Regardless of treatment choice--alternative, traditional, or none! The patients comfort level with the treatment weighs heavily on the outcome. If this boy isn't bought into the treatment and it's outcomes, I am of the opinion (and it is just that--my opinion)that NOTHING this judge or any of us say will matter! He has to have the will and the "want to" survive.
My thoughts and prayers go out to all involved in this case. It is highly complicated and the repercussions are immeasurable. If he seeks out alternative treatment and it works then it will be a feather in the cap of alternative practioners everywhere. If alternative treatment doesn't work the traditional practioners will wag their fingers and say "I told you so" and the mother/parents will most likely be sent to jail for negligence.
Any way you look at this, it is a scary thought that the court system can mandate what an individual's required treatment should be. Treatment should be a choice NOT a requirement!
First off, congratulations on
First off, congratulations on beating cancer … twice. The paradoxes and complexities of your story are unfortunate but probably dangerously indicative of the modern war on cancer.
Second, do I know what I'm talking about? I like to think so, but I'm open to being wrong.
Now, I agree with almost everything you say (especially the point about a judge insisting on a non-traditional treatment). But you're drawing the conclusion that I think the child (and whatever we may or may not know about him, we can agree that he's a child) should go into chemo according to the court's judgement, when I merely pleaded that his mother bring him back—which, coincidentally, happened to be the exact same plea that one of his alleged 'religions', the Nemenhah Band, made on their home page (at the bottom).
I do think it's important for the state of Minnesota to charge the parents. Win or lose, it's important that these issues are challenged in US courts. Otherwise, we would have what we already do have, but in spades—people claiming a 'right' to do whatever they want under the banner of religious freedom. More than basic free speech, no Constitutional right has undergone more abuse in America than that aspect of the first Amendment.
Before I get into that: The problem I have with alternative treatments is that the term 'alternative treatments' is so broad that nobody has any idea what it really means. When you say it, what do you mean? And be careful not to define 'alternative treatments' by exclusion—be careful not to say that it's any treatment not accepted by Western medicine. That's not a definition, that's the opposite of a definition. The only thing achieved by such a definition is to remind us that at least Western medicine CAN be defined and CAN be understood. 'Alternative treatments' is a deceptive construct—shrouded in enough catch-all mystery to include just about anything, true or not, with total impunity.
Keep in mind, I object chiefly to the mother's justification for taking him. The alleged claim is that they are protected by the first amendment's assurance of religious freedom, i.e. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
Curiously, the Nemenhah Band is not a Native American tribe; they are a 'traditional organization', meaning little more than they are a group of people who got together and formed a group based on the 'ancient traditions' of a tribe. That's about it. Nonetheless, they claim legal protection under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (this is outrageous; you sign up to join and suddenly you're 'Indigenous'?) as well as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which is also outrageous considering the Supreme Court struck down this act in 1997 (City of Boerne, Texas v. Flores).
Look at the Line of Authority by which the Band asserts their religious freedom in the US. As you do keep in mind that it's entirely predicated on an Act of Congress—which the first amendment goes some way to make clear is not within Congressional power. This hasn’t stopped Congress from trying, and often. Nor has it stopped people from seeking ways to subvert the rights of others by claiming religious freedom.
Now let me ask you something. Recently, the Associated Press reported on a Wisconsin jury that found Leilani Neumann, 41, a mother, guilty of second-degree reckless homicide in the death of her 11-year-old daughter, who suffered from diabetes. Instead of getting medical help for her, she prayed. Her daughter stopped breathing and died. Her father goes to trial in July on the same charges.
Do you think this is appropriate? I do. Had the state of Wisconsin stepped in sooner—i.e. had someone in a position of authority tried to assert this girl's right to survival, her right to access medicine—she might still be alive.
Instead, her parents prayed for her. Prayer is, to me, an unacceptable treatment modality. Why? Because there's zero evidence that it works. None. If a doctor told me that I had a disease and that his recommended treatment was prayer, I would see to it that he lost his license.
The long point is this: the court system is trying to mandate treatment because the individual is 13, and being a parent does not, by itself, make someone either smart or responsible, and when they seem to act against the perceived interests of their children it's important that someone say or do something because a parent's good intentions are no better than anyone else's good intentions. Further, the mother sought to justify taking the boy on the run by saying the government, the law of the land, grants her freedom of religion, which she asserts through an organization that only claims to be religious by way of legal constructs enacted by a government whose authority they--like she--only truly acknowledge when it suits them.
Again, congratulations.