State Demands Child Take Cancer-Causing Drugs
This case is about whether the parents have a right to determine the medical treatment for their minor aged child. Here is the block of text that sums up what I have an issue with. The child had Cancer and had some treatment and recent diagnostic scans showed the child was Cancer-free so the parents didn't feel any more treatment was necessary. In fact the additional dose of medication was said in package inserts to cause secondary Cancer. If I were the parent I would question why more drugs should be given knowing the documented side effect.
In the quotes, the emphasis is mine.
“‘Have all of these drugs been approved by the FDA as safe and effective for children?’ I asked Jacob’s treating oncologist,” he said. “‘Yes,’ she replied, they have been FDA-approved for children.”
However, according to the official package inserts mandated by the government to describe the drugs contained and their complications, she was “flat wrong,” Farris said.
“In fact, as it turned out, the treating doctor had never even seen, much less read, these official FDA-required package inserts,” he reported.
A warning accompanying another drug demanded by the doctors, vincristine, was typical of those in the case, he said.
That warning said, “Patients who received chemotherapy with vinchristine sulfate in combination with anticancer drugs known to be carcinogenic have developed second malignancies.”
“This is not an easy case. It is not a case where a child has a current illness and the treatment is tested and proven to be safe and effective – those cases are easily resolved. The best evidence is that Jacob no longer has objective evidence of cancer. And not a single drug that the doctors want to give Jacob is FDA-approved for children for his kind of cancer,” Farris said.
He said it is a judgment call, a balancing of risks, and the issue is who makes that decision.
“The doctor told me during the deposition that she thinks that she should make the call – for every child in this situation. And she would give the same answer every time, rather than making an individual judgment,” Farris wrote. “I can’t imagine a more clear case of the need for parental rights.”
Michael Farris works for HSLDA, an organization who is concerned with parental rights and homeschooling. Homeschooling is often couched as a parental rights issue (and I agree that it is a parental rights issue).