Hodgkin lymphoma is one of the more curable forms of cancer — the 5 year survival rates for patients who are middle-aged or younger is over 90%, and for kids, it is over 95%. These results assume, of course, that the cancer patient is actually treated with modern medicine — neglect that, and all bets are off. You’re almost certainly going to die of it.
Daniel Hauser is a 13 year old victim of Hodgkin lymphoma here in Minnesota. Doctors give him a 5% chance of surviving the disease, not because he has some particularly lethal form of the cancer, but because his mother is a religious fruitcake who who wants to deny her child treatment. Her reasoning is insane.
Hauser, whose son was diagnosed in January with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, said conventional treatments such as chemotherapy conflict with the family’s religious beliefs. She said they prefer natural remedies such as herbs and vitamins.
Asked where she learned about the alternative healing techniques, Hauser said, “on the Internet.”
If one of my kids was deadly ill, and I had a doctor who was telling me that she has a very good treatment, and she can tell me how it works, and she could show my statistics and clinical trials that backed up her claims, and on the other side I had priest waving his bible and telling me that it was a sin to treat the disease with secular medicine, but had no track record of success, and no solution other than vague claims of herbs from the internet, I would not be facing a difficult choice. I would commend my child into the hands of the person who had evidence of a 95% cure rate, without hesitation. There is simply something wrong with a parent who selects the 5% success rate over the 95% success rate, no matter what their motivation.
It would be easy to write them off as taking the Darwinian cure — that harsh statistical view that they’ll simply be extinguishing their contribution to the gene pool — especially since Daniel Hauser is agreeing with his parents. But he’s a 13 year old boy — no 13 year old is informed enough about medicine to make a good decision, and no 13 year old deserves to die of cancer because all he is given for treatment is “herbs”.
And this is all about religion. What a sick, stupid, wasteful thing to die for.
The Hausers declined to speak to reporters after Friday’s court session. But Dan Zwakman, a member of the Nemenhah religious group to which they belong, acted as the family spokesman. He argued that this is a case about religious freedom, noting that the group’s motto is “our religion is our medicine.”
Your medicine doesn’t work, and it’s going to kill a child. If you’re going to equate the two, the reply is obvious: your religion is wrong and lethal.
Sad and sick. These people are just like the people who refuse their newly diabetic children insulin in exchange for prayer.
Scientific medicine BAD. Scientific global communication technology GOOD.
Oh, humanity, you don’t know how I love you. . . .
:(
MPR reports that this kind of thing is actually quite rare these days. Lovely that it had to happen here in Minnesota. Just what we needed along with the Coleman fiasco and Loony Bachman.
Religious freedom?
They certainly have their priorities straight.
They read the bible and forget that 2000 years ago, a physician could really do little more than comfort people, and maybe set a bone or two. The internet didn’t exist 2000 years go. And now she believes in the internet and not modern medicine? I can’t picture it. This is definitely negligent homicide.
Also, what is so fucking natural about vitamin pills? In what alternate reality were vitamins discovered by a process which was not science? You know: 1896, Christiaan Eijkman curing beriberi with unpolished rice?
“People will offer you a pill made from the leaf of an obscure plant and say, ‘Take it, it can’t hurt you, it’s natural.’ But so is deadly nightshade.”
— Alan Alda
Isn’t radiation natural?
Anyway, I think these crackpots love going up against long odds and will cherish the thought of someone living longer than doctors said they would. They quickly chalk that part up as a “miracle” and as “proof” that doctors don’t know what there were talking about in the first place. This completely ignores the fact that a person who may have lived with proper treatment wound up dead.
Prayer must influence P53? Jeeeeebus.
I thought I read that he DID undergo a first session of chemo, absolutely hated it, and THEN the family decided it was against their religion…
Sad. Christians pray for years, and when one prayer coincidentally results in a temporary “miracle”, they mindlessly rejoice. As a great thinker said, they ignore the statistically greater instances in which their prayers led to young deaths and rejoice in the extremely rare cases where their prayers “worked” (and it oftentimes turns out that it wasn’t their prayers, but a natural recovery due to some treatments that were permitted. These tend to be recoveries that don’t last, due to the stubborn parents).
It’s all bullshit and it’s bad for ya, folks.
Orthomolecular quackery at its finest.
Do parents in the US have a legal right to refuse medical treatment for their children?
I hope the court finds a way to convince this child that neither his parents nor his church have his best interests at heart. Maybe get him into a room with other children his own age who have survived and let them clue him in?
Just think of the other kids – if he has siblings or cousins or friends. How many of them will look at this with the (generally clearer) eyes of childhood and say “Holy sh*t. My parents killed my brother.” Talk about scoring one for the other team…
It is easy to dismiss this sad case as extreme incident of religion getting in the way of medicine, arguing that so many modern hospitals are actually built in a religious tradition.
But in reality, “mainstream” religion has had more than its fair share of standing in the way of advancement of medical sciences. We all know about the stance many conservative churches-catholics and evangelicals alike-take against stem cell research. But more horrifying than that is the exorcisms they did as “cure” for epilepsy-fellowing the example Jesus set for them in Mark. When it didn’t work they did something more horrifying-making holes in the sufferers’s skull to allow the evil spirits to exist their brains. We will never know, I guess, the extent of harm this did, without any antiobiotics, anesthesia, etc. And it was standard practice until the time of Enlightenment.
Someone tell me that CPS is getting involved. This is simply unfathomable. Do they really think that chemo is a fucking walk in the park? Of course it’s not comfortable, but the alternative is, from my understanding, not treatable (death).
I’d love to hear the religious pro-lifers get in a debate over this one. Save a life or “religious freedom”?
Plus, if the kid didn’t like the side effects of chemotherapy I hear there is a natural herb that can help with that…
So let me get this straight…
In the eyes of fundamentalists, aborting an unwanted baby is bad.
But giving birth to a child and then allowing him to die from a treatable disease 13 year later is perfectly ok?
That. Makes. No. Sense.
This situation isn’t death by ignorance. Rather it’s death by wishful thinking and delusion.
What I don’t really understand about these guys, is that do they really think — I mean HONESTLY think — that eating the herbs and whatnot will cure him? Or can they see that the kid will probably die, but it’s okay because it’s about “religious freedom”. Blows my mind.
Geez, how can that family not trust good solid scientific medicine when their own cousin, Doogie, is a highly respected medical doctor?
Must have had a bad experience at a family reunion. Guess they cant all be geniuses.
I’ve been waiting for you to say something about this. I have been pissed off about this story for a few days now.
off topic can anyone tell me how i get summary or excerpt feed of the pharyngula blog?
http://feeds.feedburner.com/scienceblogs/pharyngula
im putting it a widget to display on my site but keep getting the full feed
OK, so its insane that these people will refuse modern medicine. That in itself is not only insane, but criminal, because by condemning their child to almost certain death by not giving him the most advanced treatement available, they are no better than those who gassed and burned jewish children during WWII.
But, something that was perhaps missed here is not so much the complete insanity of them refusing modern medicine, but using a modern tool, the internet, to get information about alternative treatements! Nevermind that modern medicine predates the interweb by several decades! For me, this complete dichotomy of thinking just completely blows my mind! On one hand you refuse modern medicine, and on the other hand you embrace *the* most modern of modernisms, the interweb, to find out about bogus “cures” for the child’s illness.
WTF????? Seen this before. The kid was grade school and had a curable form of childhood cancer. Parents were religious cultists from a local nexus of evil xianity.
Got a court order eventually to treat this kid after a huge amount of legal wrangling. By then it was too late and he died. No one bothers this cult anymore. Their kids get sick and sometimes they live and sometimes they die.
Another case had a happier ending. The teen ager was diagnosed with lymphoma. His parents went for state of the art medical care. He is now a doc, 60 years old, and a grandfather.
PZ,
Thanks for putting this out there.
The court decision is supposed to come down very soon as to whether or not the child will be forced to undergo proper medical treatment. I sure hope so, because even if the kid is deluded by a religious belief, saving his life and giving him a chance at a rational life is important.
Cancer treatments are pretty barbaric, figure (hope?) someday soon researchers will figure out a way to bottle spontaneous remission, since it does happen and something surely clicked in to make it happen. People I’ve known with cancer universally went with the rough treatment, spent every last dime they had, all of ’em died in the end. Some may have gotten a few months of extra suffering, most didn’t. Still, hope is probably better than no hope, even if it makes you miserable in your last days. And it’s what you choose for yourself.
It’s not like a blood transfusion or insulin. But there are indeed issues with making such a decision for someone else who is fairly bound to agree because he hasn’t much choice. He’s a kid. I doubt anyone here would deny an adult the right to decide for him/herself not to undergo chemo, radiation or radical surgery. 13 was once the age of maturity in a world where most people died around their 30s.
Should a 16-year old have the right to choose? Should a 20-year old (still in college and dependent upon parents) be allowed to choose? How about a 30-something person who moved back in because there’s no work or some other life issue? Should a wife be able to choose even if her husband disagrees?
Maybe it’s the appeal to religious freedom that most bothers you. If the kid and his parents had not used that appeal, would they then have the right to choose? What if they have no insurance, can’t possibly afford the treatments? Would they even HAVE a choice to make?
That’s not medicine, that’s child abuse…
This is the VERY SAME lunacy that so “respects” the rights of the unborn.
Never mind making sure kids and adults are given every chance to live via the administration of medical treatment, you can TERMINATE THEM TO DEATH by withholding such treatment on a religious precept. But be very sure you keep squirting ’em out there (even if it might kill the mother or whatever) as is also demanded by religious precept.
Because, obviously, life is so goddamned precious.
They see no inconsistency or hypocrisy in it. Why. Because they’ve completely lost the power of rational thought.
FEAR. That’s what’s driving this kid’s mom stark raving bananas. Where does she get that from? Why she’s so friggin’ scared?
Is she condemning her son to almost certain death because she’s NOT afraid and NOT religious?
A better way to phrase your question.
Do parents have a legal right to kill their kids?
It varies by state. There are state laws protecting faith healing that tend to be vague, contradictory, and poorly written. Then there are laws forbidding one person from murdering another.
In some states, the laws are such that the Death Cults can get away with it. One small cult in Oregon is estimated to have killed 30 or so kids of their kids in a few decades.
The number of kids killed by faith healing per year is unknown. These are hard stats to collect because they try to hide them. Little Sally is brought into the ER with an advanced case of pneumonia and dies a few hours later. Estimates range from 10 to 100 but no one really knows.
PZ, you still have any faith in humanity left?
Wow, I’m a strapping young lad and I lost mine years ago. Let the fools die. Doing us a favour, taking their genes out of the pool, and hopefully putting themselves in prison at the same time so that when they’re old and wrinkled and get out, there’s not much procreation that they can do left.
Religious Freedom?
WHAT a concept!
Cool .. so, as long as I believe in “it”, I can do whatever I want?
@jbt
What didn’t you understand? With the proper treatment the survival rate for this type of cancer is 95%. Your personal anecdotes are not data so let’s just disregard your first paragraph as ignorant blabbering. Your second paragraph makes even less sense. The person in question is underage, thus he’s not allowed to “choose”, especially when he’s not personally making that choice but is pressurised by his parents. If he was of legal age, then to hell with it. At that age he can choose to live or die as he pleases.
Could someone explain how this treatment is against their religion. I’ve heard of people denying modern medicine for religious reasons before, but no one ever specifies exactly what their religion states on the matter.
It’s obvious that they have sought medical attention before, so how and where do they draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable methods of treatment.
I have no idea.
Nobody “likes” chemo. It made my mother vomit to dehydration for days after each treatment. But it saved her life.
There is a spirited discussion regarding Minnesota’s own woo vs. sue maneno at Quiche Moraine.
I heard that too. The one the feds don’t much care for so any high school kid can get it but cancer patients and chronic disease suffers can’t.
Besides marijuana is the devil’s weed and all potheads go to hell. LOL
As someone who was diagnosed and treated for Hodgkin’s at age 13 over 20 years ago, and healthy ever since, I think that kids parents should be thrown in jail for attempted murder.
Someone needs to go vigilante on those idiot parents and save that kids life! Just seeing those pics and his sweet freckled face makes me want to PUNCH his mom in the face and sic my dogs on the dad. (they’ll lick him and cover him with dog hair!)
This is such a tragedy, can you imagine the uproar if this was a Muslim kid?
These folks are not exactly Christian wackaloons, just a variety of Mormon-New Agey wackaloons. They’re part of a wannabe Native American group that will give you full “tribal” membership for a donation of $90 and monthly dues of $5. By pretending to be native Americans, the Nemenhah can claim native religious protection under federal law.
Real Native Americans are not pleased, judging from this article in a Native newspaper.
The Book of Mormon (you know, that “other book of God”) mentions a people called the Nemenhah who were native to North America. So the founders of this little group have appropriated not only Native culture but Mormon mythology. Talk about holding two contradictory thoughts simultaneously in your head …
This is not an ideal situation. Let’s face it: the kid is most likely utterly drained from his current situation, and the pressure from his parents must be unbearable. In no way would he be able to make a rational, strong decision without his parents subsequently filling his mind with more of their anti-medicine (but apparently pro-Internet/pro-random articles) nonsense.
Cancer is serious. The treatments are not comfortable, but you know what? They save lives. I’ve seen the deaths that result from stalling treatments, prayers notwithstanding.
Here’s another site exposing the weirdness that is the Nemenhah Band of Werenotreallynativesbutwesayweare.
Even the Mormons reject this group, which clearly has no real connection to actual Native Americans or any real church. Additionally, the Nemenhah website apparently pushes “natural” medicinals and tries to rope its members into some kind of MLM to sell the stuff.
Somebody needs to tell Orac about these folks. This is super-woo.
(sarcastically) It really all makes sense.
More babies born means a larger pool of people to suffer and christianity is all about the glorification of suffering like jebus did on the cross for the salvation of others.
Hence the fundamental positions of anti-abortion and anti-contraception (more babies), anti-stem cell research (more incurable diseases), anti-homosexuality and anti-same sex marriage (less happiness), anti-euthanasia for the terminally ill (more suffering).
It all makes sense after all.
On the news the other night they claimed to be Catholic and Nemenhah. The Nemenhah Band of the Native American Church is open to anyone (no Native American blood is required). They claim protection under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita. Thanks to John on the NESS forum for the info. The Nemehah website is not working beyond the first page…but the cache of the Nemehah website is available.
Sorry to post again so quickly. The first link is broken. The same article from Indian Country is reprinted at this site.
We need a bill of rights for children and those who are unable to care for themselves. First up would be the right to receive medical care.
On the other hand, as Larry Niven said, “Evolution in action”. Personally, I’m too sympathetic to the abused children to embrace that view.
I suspect that her religious beliefs aren’t against the chemotherapy itself. More likely it would be the blood transfusions that would probably be required afterward. Then again, who knows. I am just curious where her religious doctrine says chemotherapy is evil.
I could understand the parents choice to refuse treatment with so many other types of cancer. But Hodgkin’s?! In children it is almost never fatal, if treated. For the kids sake I am hoping for spontaneous remission.
If you fail to provide food for your child, social services would take him or her, as you would have shown an obvious inability to care for your child, if not outright neglect (well, no it IS neglect).
This is no different. Lock them up. Take the kid away. Cure him and let him live his life. He will die before getting out of his teens because his parents are ignorant retards and our society celebrates that.
Its not about religious freedom. There is freedom from persecution and there is neglectful, dangerous behaviour.
His parents are unfit. There is no defense.
doesn’t really matter which flavor of woo they’re subscribing to, it’s still about to kill their son :-(
Hmmm, didn’t read the part about them being Nemenhah. Just figured they were JWs or something along those lines.
There is definitely legal precedent for forcing parents to allow medical treatment of their kids over their religious objections – there was a measles case in Philadelphia with Christian Scientists inthe 1980s or 90s. Such precedent makes sense because this is a form of child abuse.
CoEnzyme Q10 will clear that cancer right up.
The “Nemenhah band” is a collection of native American wannabees, not descended from any tribe. They were prevented from usurping one of the names of a Nez perce band … any legitimate tribe or band already has their own name.
“This program is provided only to the duly adopted members of the Nemenhah Band and Traditional Organization and is OFFERING BASED. The application for Spiritual Adoption may be downloaded or you may enter you data on this site. The application asks for a Suggested offering is $145 for the first year,each additional year is a $55 suggested offering.”
Adoption by a tribe to anyone with $145? Yeah, sure they are a tribe. And a spiritual or ceremonial adoption doesn’t give you any legal rights under any federal laws, just some social benefits. It also is not passed on to your children.
Native Americans do not have any religious problems with accepting modern medical treatments. Their medicine men will take care of the psyche and the docs take care of the body.
Fricken nutzy parents!
I think what should BE DONE is line-up all the people that have survived Hodgkins lymphoma by taking chemo in one line and all the people that survived Hodgkins lymphoma with herbs and prayer in another line…and have EVERYONE compare lines.
Someone show me one peer-reviewed study where anyone has survived Hodkins Disease with herbs and prayer!
Posted by: Mike Caton | May 9, 2009 1:00 PM
There is definitely legal precedent for forcing parents to allow medical treatment of their kids
*********
Judges routinely order blood transfusions for young children whose parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses. It become a more difficult problem with older children who are already brainwashed. Trying to treat an uncooperative patient with radiation and chemotherapy would be difficult. If the child dies, the parents should be charged with a crime.
While an adult can accept or decline medical treatment based on the advice of whatever invisible childhood friend they continue to claim acquaintance with, the same cannot be said for a child. The child is not sufficiently mature to form rational decisions.
In this case the adults who brought this youngster into the world are also evincing signs that they are not sufficiently mature to make decisions based on rational thought.
Jehovah’s Witnesses strike me as odd, particularly because I live near a center where some of them regularly gather. They seem almost robotic, as if they were pre-programmed to distribute propaganda with a disturbing sense of pleasure. It makes me feel joyful to be a reasonable freethinker.
Chemo is rarely fun, but people’s response to it varies quite a bit. I’ve seen reactions from “most horrible thing I’ve ever been through” to “That stuff was great! When can I have some more.” No, seriously, that’s a quote. From a sane person. Some people with advanced chemosensitive cancers feel better after taking chemotherapy, since cancer itself can make people feel horrible even before it starts in on the vital organs.
In general–not all the time, but in general–the treatment for HL is actually not that horrific. Most patients feel a little nausea (which is usually easily relieved) and a little fatigue (which is not) especially towards the end. I wonder if this kid got enough supportive treatment. In particular, if his parents gave him the anti-nausea treatment he was supposed to get at home after his chemo or if they withheld it and used the inevitable side effects to pressure him into agreeing to no further care.
wheatdogg @#41 and #43 notes that the Nemenhah group is also pushing “natural” remedies via pyramid schemes. It always fascinates me to see how gullibility that is nurtured in one area (religion, for example) breeds gullibility in every area. If you train your brain to believe in the Book of Mormon, then you’re more likely to fall for pyramid schemes.
Utah has a reputation for its pyramid schemes. No surprise there.
http://www.pyramidschemealert.org/PSAMain/news/UtahScamState.html
Sounds like the basis for a neurological study.
The parents in this case are in Minnesota, but the woo that is strong in them is based on the Book of Mormon. Is this pyramid scheme penchant also evident in other evangelical groups?
If this is about faith, why are they using herbs in the first place? I mean, if God wants you to have a headache, isn’t it anathema to take aspirin? However natural.
Really – some people need to learn to make up their minds.
Sheeesh – I’m cynical.
Why is this filed under “religion”, PZ? It should be classified as “evil”. It’s no different from parents of a hemophiliac child denying transfusions in the name of their religion – a death sentence to a kid whose genetic dice came up as double-ones.
These people are condemning their child to death, willingly and almost gleefully. No two ways about it. But because they’re professing membership in some sketchy religious cult, people are actually giving them a pass. Read some of the comments to the article. Further, just think about the article itself. That there is considered an objective element to this, that either “side” could be right, strikes me as beyond absurd. But typically. One commenter mentions drilling holes in skulls to release demons a hundred years ago and asks rhetorically, could someone pass that off with the religious freedom defense now. I say, YES! I see little difference between that and what these parents are doing, other than the outside chance that the skull drilling *might* heal without too much sustained damage, while this child almost certainly is going to die.
If you told someone that you refuse to take your child to the doctor for so much as a freaking *cold* because you’re a Pastafarian, and the FSM came to you in a dream and told you not to, they’d likely call you a monster and inform child services posthaste. Now, what are the chances that that same person would see some validity in these parents’ claim? Probably greater than 50%. I fail to see a bit of difference. (Except of course that the atheist/satirical Pastafarian would just be making a point; these parents are, shall we say, deadly serious in privileging their “beliefs” over the well-being of their child).
Well, according to this:
from the Star Tribune, the kid is saying he won’t take it–or at least, his “mother” is saying so. So this is gonna get messier.
Minnesota used to be a brainpower state….
Lurky – I understood what was written. And looked up the details. The “survival rate” for this cancer is measured in terms of 5-year remission (called “cure”). At which point this kid will be 18. True, the kid doesn’t get to choose. I mean, it’s not like he’s pregnant 13-year old girl or anything (in which case his choice would overrule what his parents have to say).
And if you don’t care if he dies at 18, why do you care so much that he dies at 15 (average survival rate of 1.5 to 2 years with no treatment)? Tell the truth – you care nothing about this teenager. You just don’t want parents to make medical choices if they appeal to religious beliefs. At least be honest about your motivation.
You didn’t answer the underlying question – if this family had no insurance and no chance of coming up with $100-200K for treatments, would there even BE a choice to make? There are ~50 million people in this country without insurance, states have caps and long waiting lists for Medicaid. People young and old and in between die every day for lack of access to even the most basic medical care. Meanwhile, insurance company pencil-pushing hacks routinely deny the most effective of treatments to policyholders in order to save a few bucks. Is it more acceptable that some faceless accountant sentence this kid to death rather than his parents?
Okay.
Kid dying.
Ooops.
Probably unnecessarily, at this time, any way.
Sorry ’bout that. I feel sorry for the kid, contempt for the parents.
The end…
What these parents fail to understand is this: any suffering that they think they’re preventing by blocking their child from treatment is increased tenfold when the cancer is left unchecked. This is wicked.
In Canada this child would likely be apprehended by the courts, made an emergency ward of the state, and then treated. It can even happen right in the emergency room under the authority of a child protection worker if there is immanent risk. Treating medical staff acting in good faith are held harmless.
Are there no similar emergency apprehension laws in Minnesota?
Hasn’t anyone pointed out the very obvious : that herbs used to be considered medicines because they contain (sometimes) substances which are medically useful?
In other words ,they consent to use herbs and not the cancer medications is illogical because they’re still administering drugs.
Oh…….sorry – I’m looking for logic in religion, stupid of me.
I seriously want to punch that smug witch in the face. I’d even be willing to risk a boxer’s fracture on her obviously fucking hard head.
Then take the kid, put him in a real school, give him a laptop and a high speed internet connection and the urls for some teens with cancer support groups, an iPhone, an XBox, and make sure the kid does normal adolescent boy things like kissing girls, wanking off (that high speed connection is not just for cancer support and MMORPG), riding a bike, drooling for cars, etc. Then what do you want to bet chemo won’t suck *quite* so much as his first experience with it?
She said they prefer natural remedies such as herbs and vitamins.
To chemo? Hell, who wouldn’t?
Look, these are ignorant people; they probably haven’t had a science class since high school. Now, if they go with the medical route, they have to essentially come up to speed, at least on Hodgkins, pretty much overnight and it’s just overwhelming. Religion, on the other hand, is pretty easy to follow and offers simple, comforting answers.
They’re in over their heads and grasping at straws (which is generally the case when you’re counting on prayer to solve a really big problem).
You can rank on them, but the family really need some hand-holding to do the right thing. And as near as I can tell, the only one doing that is her asshole of a pastor.
(Chances are they don’t have insurance either, is a whole ‘nother bag of scary.)
jbt – I’m British, and a passionate believer in socialised medicine. General access (or lack of) to healthcare has nothing to do with this case. Your point is really a total non-sequitur; it’s like saying we shouldn’t deal with obesity because there are children starving in Africa.
Incidentally, in the UK this would come under Gillick Competence (or similar in the deveolved bits): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillick_competence
So he may have been competent to make his own decisions anyway. The idea of having a criteria of competence is so that you do not suffer from the decisions of others, jbt – it’s one thing to jump off a bridge, another to be thrown.
Ever hear of medicare and medicaid? One of those evil socialist safety net programs. The treatment is available for this kid if he wants it regardless of finances. Blame the commies in the federal government.
From the sounds if it, you will have to strap the kid down. One one hand, just let it go as a parent, I have the right to decided what happens to my children – if I want them to die from cancer then so be it. Then again he was born and is a human now – he does deserve a shot at life, but it will just allow ignorance and stupidity to breed later. Just more taxpayer money, wasted effort, and trouble.
From my own experiences, there are cases where state officials will lawfully take the child and guarantee him treatment if they see negligence within the home environment, health care notwithstanding. The family is not taking the resources available to them, and it is unfortunate to see the views of their cult taking precedence over the life of a vulnerable child.
I don’t know which is worse, parents who have been brainwashed and, in turn, brainwashed their child; or the people on the other side who salute religious freedom when it serves them but are just as willing to persecute that freedom when things get messy. Either you fully support religious freedom or you don’t! And either opinion is fine with me, so long as your opinion doesn’t extend beyond yourself and your family.
How many of us would have a BIG problem if one of these religious types called child services whenever our children did not attend church? (I’m guessing it’s nearly 100%) So how do some of you feel justified in saying that someone should call child protective services? Don’t these parents have just as much right to make these decisions as you do? I don’t like the choices these people are making, but I fully support their right to make them.
Bottom line: if the kid dies, you can use it as an example of why religion is dangerous.
DaveP:
There’s a difference between church attendance and negligence that results in death. Church service is not mandated, nor should it ever be, but the parents are manipulating this child and twisting his view of the situation. The situations and what their results come to be are entirely different.
No parent should willfully let their children die from a treatable disease. Our government should preserve existing life by enforcing all of our current laws. Church attendance, on the other hand, is not required, and non-attendance does not result in serious consequences on a physical level.
Bad comparison.
Furthermore, I’d rather not use the death of a child to score points against a religious death cult. As Alfred said in The Dark Knight, almost immediately after Bruce said the aging butler could now gloat over his regrettable mistakes, “Today, I don’t want to, sir.”
I think that the child’s right to not be abused by his parents ranks higher than the parents’ freedom of religion. When religion is harmful, that’s a good sign that it’s time to get rid of it. Thinking people will reach this conclusion.
No they don’t. You are comparing parents letting their kids go to church with…..
parents who kill their kids. Going to church and murdering children is an apples to oranges strawperson.
Parents don’t own their kids and have absolute control over them in our society. And our society considers children to be human beings. I know it is a bitch for religous fanatics, control freaks, and sociopaths but that is the way it is.
After adulthood, age 18, people are free to refuse medical treatment and die any way they want. What is so hard about making it to 18 to die that people want to hurry the process up?
Jim Smith @ 22:
Of course, that does sort of negate PZ’s point when he says:
M:
How lucky you are to live where health care is not a privilege, but a right. So… you would be okay with this kid making his own choice for his own reasons? I might agree. A young friend where I live was recently allowed to opt out of his second lung transplant (CF) at the age of 14. His family had no insurance, so he was used as a lab rat for years in an attempt to just grow up. He finally said “Uncle” and went on out, one of the most courageous and dear humans I’ve ever met. The state didn’t force him, nor did his parents. I guess a lifetime of suffering makes that okay, even if that lifetime is woefully short. I know, I know. Mere anecdote.
I simply find it amazingly hypocritical for a nation that routinely rations health care by class to pretend it cares about the life of any individual, whatever age. Millions of children in this country are “food insecure” on a daily basis as well. Obesity isn’t their problem.
Truth is that it’s purely anti-religious sentiment that drives the whining on this case. It’s not about caring if the kid lives or dies. In a country where medical care is routinely denied, should the parents be forced by the state to go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt to give the kid treatment he doesn’t want? Should the state pay for that forced treatment? And if so, can they be made to pay for similar treatments people want but can’t afford? – Note, that’s not going to happen in my lifetime. The insurance industry is a lot more powerful than We the People and what we may want.
This is a sad case, but I don’t see any particular legal/legislative or rights-based reason to interfere. Makes no sense to me to force treatment and/or bankruptcy on this family when official backs are turned daily on those in need, across the board.
I presume someone has thought of giving Daniel the facts, away from the malign influence of his lunatic parents, and asking him what he wants?
As disgusting as it may sound (and it is) the survival of that kid is kind of a Darwinian thing. He likely inherited “the stupid gene” from his family anyway and the natural selection process will just eventually eliminate the wrong genome.
Oh yes, because vitamins are SOOOOOO natural. I see those little pressed tablets growing on bushes along the road EVERYWHERE!
I feel bad for the kid, but at least at this rate these lunatics are going to eliminate themselves from the population by killing all of their kids.
Daniel, your sacrifice will not be in vain.
My parents are JWs. What terrifies me is that I have two younger brothers, one fourteen and one six (who has autism) and if they were ever to get sick my parents would opt against a blood transfusion.
@80
Oops, that’s what I get when I forget to write my name and address above.
Horrible, disgusting, sick fucks for whom hell really should be invented.
WHAT REALLY NEED TO BE PERSECUTED HERE IS “THE NEMENHAH BAND.”
this faux-native group needs to exposed and stopped ASAP. it was invented by someone going by “cloudpiler” SPECIFICALLY to dodge legal persecution of the fact that it is/was a company selling “native herbs” in a MLM scheme which advises against all “western medicine.”
this is from http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=83663 -all the “nemenhah” “cloudpiler” and “native american nutritionals” sites are down right now (of course).
“Cloudpiler, a grandson of Chief Joseph, the great Nez Perce Chief and others who are part of Native American Nutritionals became recognized Native American Practitioners by seeking adoption into the Nemenhah Band and Native American Traditional Organization.
As Shahaptian Guides, they gained a valuable connection with the Holistic Principle of Native American Healing… as well as a legal safety net where natural healing is concerned.
You can read more about this on their webpage… the long and short of it goes like this:
By becoming Native American Practitioners, they (or YOU or anyone who gets adopted) qualify under the protections and exemptions provided by the Federal Native American Free Exercise of Religion Act of 1993 (NAFERA).
This Act of Congress was passed almost unanimously by both houses of legislature in Washington, D.C. The Act protects the Spiritual Path of Native Americans and their Traditional Spiritual Leaders.
NAFERA dictates that “no laws or statutes may be enacted that tend to regulate the establishment of Native American Religions or the free exercise thereof.”
This makes exclusive licensure laws that have either been passed by, or are presently on the dockets of every state legislature in the country to fall under the NAFERA exemption. It also applies to CAFTA and other trade regulatory statutes!!
The bottom line is this: Native American Practitioners are exempt by definition from such regulatory statutes.”
someone very evil has insulted real natives by using this legal loop-hole to make money, and has created a “native religion” out of a book of mormon bunk “tribe” just to sell supplements, and now this kid is going to DIE!
My best friend’s brother in law (sister’s husband) was diagnosed with prostate cancer three (or so) years ago. They are Missouri Synod Lutherans and decided to forgo treatment, which isn’t dangerous, really, if you believe as they do that fervent prayer will resurrect him (I guess death would add the extra oomph to their prayers).
That was the plan, anyway, until he started to show symptoms. Now they’re open to listening to advice from another brother in law who’s a doctor, after three years wasted.
Your faith is kinda like your genitalia.
As long as you keep it behind your zipper, it ain’t nobody’s bidness but your own…
Wbut when you haul it out and start slinging it around, it becomes the ‘bidness’ of anybody near enough to get any on ’em. And they may then act to limit your dick-swinging…
Wait a minute, I didn’t realize that. The Nemenhah band is a collection of fake Indians? I’ve seen some argument that this is also a matter of Native American autonomy, but it looks like a bunch of whitey wanna-be poseurs pretending to have the mystical knowledge of the Noble Red Man…so it’s complete bunk all the way through.
Sounds like a blatant lie. Chief Joseph died long ago, 1840 to 1904, and his grandson would probably be long dead as well.
Really this sounds like garden variety medical quackery wooism. Which kills all the time. One woman was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 33. Stage 1, greater than 90% chance of full cure. She went alternative and died at age 34. I saw some of the stuff she was taking, and eating dirt or lawn clippings would have shown better efficacy.
This kid might well change his mind later. If he thinks chemo is bad, wait until the lymphoma progresses. Dying of cancer isn’t fun either.
See http://www.greaterthings.com/Records/Nemenhah/index.html for the origins in the Book of Mormon
Here’s an excerpt: They were allegedly written upon plates of various metals, processed animal hides and paper velum. Allegedly, the records were archived in several locations in North and Central America anciently, with the only surviving copies of the histories of the Nemenhah being strictly guarded in the libraries at a non-disclosed location in Sanpete County, Utah. When the LDS church said they could not translate them another person eventually translated them into Spanish-related language. They were then translated into English and first published Nov. 11, 2004. (11/11)
I don’t care about this child. He clearly doesn’t want the medicine, and 13 years of age is old enough to understand the consequences. As the sign said, “sometimes one’s purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.” Very well then, get on with it.
There are thousands of children who die every day due to easily preventable illnesses that are cheap to prevent or treat. And they want to live, and their parents want them to live, and they’ll take the medicine, but they can’t afford it. I’ll save my energy for them.
raven:
The parents didn’t give this kid cancer, it’ll be the cancer that kills him (unless he gets hit by a bus or struck by lightning or gets swine flu in the meantime). I disagree with religious exclusions on basic health care, but I disagree strongly with financial exclusions as well. We’ve kids dying in this country of abscessed teeth.
There’s lots of ways to die, I think humans have some experience with most of them, given that death is universal in all generations. If my kid was truly adamant on not undergoing this or that very gnarly treatment and we’d researched all options, I might appeal to religion to support his decision to the badge-crowd (but I’d fight hard with him about it in my own house!).
I can remember when lymphomas and various leukemias had no treatment at all. I was diagnosed with such, sent home to die at the age of seven. I didn’t die, it just went away one day. That happens, though I’m pretty sure I’ll die of something someday anyway. For much of my life the chances of spontaneous remission were exactly the same (or better) than remission by gnarly overzealous treatment. Far as I can see from the several I’ve lost to cancer (treated and not) this year, still true.
This “religion” looks to me a bit like the internet marriage credential scam, recognized in all states except NC (I think). Where you sign up, get your “I am certified to perform marriages” credentials, go do the ceremony at the Big Party that’s nothing but a party anyway. Perhaps the family is forwarding a legally defensible criteria they obtained for the occasion. Perhaps, all told, the kid just wants to be left alone, really-really doesn’t want radiation and chemo, isn’t particularly frightened by the prospect of death. Do you know?
@ druid #83
There is a ‘stupid gene’? I must have missed that discovery. Link? But yeah, obviously if he inherited it the kid should die. Wanker.
The whole ‘Darwin Awards… good for the gene pool’ mentality sickens me almost as much as the mentality on display in this story.
Interesting that the random generator sidebar included this;
Children should not have to die to uphold the religious beliefs of their parents.
Fiisi @ 94: “He clearly doesn’t want the medicine, and 13 years of age is old enough to understand the consequences.”
Horse shit. I had to sedate a 13 year old last week with a gaping 12 cm gash on his leg because he kept crying and screaming and said “just leave it alone, I don’t want it stitched.”
A thirteen year old in some cases may be able to contribute to the medical decision making process, but not when he wants something that is obviously to 99% of sane adults absolutely crazy. If you are pregnant, having a baby is sane. And having an abortion is sane. So a 13 year old girl should be able to decide which of these sane options she wants to take. However if you are pregnant, stabbing a knife in your belly to kill the baby is insane, so a 13 year old girl should be prevented from doing this. I agree that 13 year olds can contribute and should have some medical autonomy. But that doesn’t extend to making completely fucktarded decisions.
“I’ll save my energy for them.”
The presence of one injustice (lack of universal health care) does not negate the significance of another injustice (crazy parents who endanger their children because of ignorant religious beliefs.) Moreover, there are reasons to set important precedents, which is the reason that the ACLU defends the KKK and the Westboro Baptist Church. So we need energy for both of these problems.
He clearly doesn’t want the medicine, and 13 years of age is old enough to understand the consequences.
Fiisi, do you know any 13 year-olds??? No, they’re not. In fact, in terms of risk-taking behavior, people really don’t seem to understand the possible consequences of their actions until mid-20s, at least. No, a 13 year-old, especially one raised by such effing idiots, certainly does not have the ability to make that decision. This is also backed up in law: children of that age are not considered mentally developed enough to make their own informed decisions about marriage, going into the military, drinking alcohol, or even driving a car, much less decisions about life and death.
yes PZ, they are faux-natives, you “become” one by giving them $90 or $95 and then a continual $5/month religious “due.” and all their “herb cures” are sold by “cloudpiler’s” own “native american nutritionals” it’s all gone dark on their sites right now (imagine that) but you can read what some real natives think of them here:
http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/archive/28147394.html
http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=1177.0
Weird. In an odd conversation I had a while ago with a cashier type person and a few of her sidekicks (in a pet supply store, oddly enough, for the record) the topic came up: which cancer would you choose, if you had to have one. And Hodgkins won, based on the survival rate. Someone pointed it out, and we all agreed: that was the one. Odds you’d pull through had become so good.
Well, unless you’ve been raised by completely fucking batshit insane parents, I guess.
What do you mean by religion? Also, is abortion killing?
PZ and everyone, please read down the board at that second link i just provided, you’ll find gems like:
“Cloudpiler is a pseudonym for a Philip Landis, sentenced to 2 10-year prison terms in Montana for fraud. He has also been featured as a shaman, providing peyote to his “followers???…or he was until the Utah Supreme Court stepped in.
He latest “project??? is the Mentinah archives. After doing some independent research, my results are thus: he is bogus.”
they’ve got rundowns on what domains he owns and other dirt. pkus the real history of how he “discovered” the existence of the “nemenhah” in some mormon texts. wow, these actual native people (and a few LDS church members too) hate this guy and his “nemenhah” nonsense.
http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=1177.0
now i’m starting to think that a legal case could be made against this Landis “Cloudpiler” for creating a “religion” with a belief system that is going to kill a kid when the whole thing was a sham to sell his supplements….
Carlie:
So… citizens shouldn’t be allowed to drive, marry, drink, live on their own or vote until “at least” their mid-20s? Yeah, I know. We draft (or used to) teenagers to fight wars, because they all think they’re immortal. I don’t think that is this teenager’s problem.
Your objections to a 13-year old being able to weigh the consequences of his actions in this (consequence: slow, ugly death by cancer, practically assured) have more to do with the complexity of our modern society than with the capabilities of teenagers. 13 is, virtually universal in all traditional societies, the age of maturity. Mid-20s is when you graduate from college in our modern world, hopefully become employable at a living wage. In my grandmother’s day if you weren’t married by 16 you were an “Old Maid.” Teen pregnancy was not a horror when I was growing up either. Seems humans are biologically programmed to be most fertile and capable between 13 and 19. Go figure. The issue these days is primarily financial/educational, not biological capability.
Reactions here remind me a little of Fristian “Diagnosis by Video” from the floor of the Congressional chamber.
jbt @ 95
Do you seriously not comprehend that there are different kinds of cancer? Despite referring to some by name you just don’t seem to understand that. Because that, and squinting and standing on your head, is the only way the first half of your comment is even sort of comprehensible.
I’ll ignore the second half because I don’t particularly want to get into an argument over whether thirteen year olds have a right to be pressured into suicide by their parents.
Should have known. In my post @59 I was trying to work out the Utah-Minnesota-Mormon connection. Turns out that Cloudpiler (Phillip R. Landis, N.D.) is from Utah. He’s the creator of the fake Native American Tribe, MLM marketing schemes, unholy marriage with Mormonism, etc (more details, including jail time, noted above in luna’s post @#102).
“Landis is a certified Naturopath and is President of the Utah Naturopathic Medical Association” a quote from his own marketing materials.
Someone needs to bring this information to the attention of the child at risk, and perhaps to the judge in Minnesota as well.
Who is this jbt person? Isn’t about time we got to vote him/her off the island?
“People I’ve known with cancer universally went with the rough treatment, spent every last dime they had, all of ’em died in the end. Some may have gotten a few months of extra suffering, most didn’t.”
Like my mom’s friend who is a 30+ year breast cancer survivor? She thought she wouldn’t live to see her kids grow up and now most of her grandkids are adults. But she’s dying of cancer now, in her 60’s, so it definitely wasn’t worth it. The world will be a poorer place without her.
Or my good friend down the street who had the most aggressive treatment possible because her kids were 2 and 4. She’s been healthy for almost 5 years now. A few months, my patootie.
Oh, but you went into remission, therefore ALL people will either live or die by the strength of their cancer, nothing to do with treatments? I have some herbal supplements to sell you. And a bridge.
But. Not. this. society.
For good reason.
Lynna,
“Someone needs to bring this information to the attention of the child at risk, and perhaps to the judge in Minnesota as well.”
no kidding! do you think daniel hauser would be so willing to die for his beliefs if he knew that those beliefs were carefully crafted by a known fraudster who wanted to use new-age-generic “native wisdom” as a cover story to sell “holistic medicine” supplements without the risk of being sued for fraud again?
the knowledge that this kid is willing to die for a belief in a religion invented by a con-man with a MLM supplement company to push is much MUCH more disturbing to me than anything else in this story. i guarantee daniel and his parents don’t know the truth.
i sent this info to several minnesota newspapers/blogs/local news stations, i really hope some reporter digs into the true history of “cloudpiler” and the “nemenhah” and writes an expose before it’s too late for daniel.
Stephanie W.:
Of course I do. And there’s several that are Hodgkins-style lymphomas. One of which this boy has been diagnosed with. They’ll inevitably involve circulatory system adjunct organs (glands, spleen, primarily). I doubt it’s a pleasant way to go. But then, I can’t think of any pleasant ways to go…
This kid has every opportunity to accept offered treatment. All he has to do is say so. It says right in the story he’d already undergone part of the chemo, decided that was enough and refused to finish. Maybe it is the Mom imposing, maybe she’s just grasping at an internet version of religion/alternative medicine in order to defend his choice. I don’t know that level of detail. Do you?
Phyllis:
I am a 50+ year survivor of lymphoma.
No need to vote me “off the island.” Enjoy your Fristian moment, I did know that actual dialogue was off-limits here in the echo chamber.
People I’ve known with cancer universally went with the rough treatment, spent every last dime they had, all of ’em died in the end.
Everyone with or without cancer is going to die in the end. However, depending on the cancer, people with cancer may die of, with, or without the cancer. Most people with HL, testicular cancer, Ewing’s sarcoma, and limited stage breast, colon, or prostate cancer will die of something else. Ten year survival rates for HL are grater than 94% and essentially the same as 5 year survival rates. (References on request.) Many people with advance prostate cancer, chronic leukemia, and some forms of breast cancer will die with cancer, but not of it. In other words, the cancer can be controlled to the point where it affects life expectancy little if they continue to be treated. Some cancers are still rarely curable. If this kid were suffering from pancreatic cancer or renal cell carcinoma and he refused further treatment I doubt anyone would have objected. But refusing treatment for HL is almost like refusing treatment for appendicitis-trading high probability of cure for almost certain death. Altogether a bad idea. And not a decision a 13 year old should be making.
er, #109 was mine. Outta here, enjoy your righteous indignation!
luna1580@#108: Great! Good idea sending the info out to blogosphere and newspapers. You should include the Salt Lake Tribune. They’ll pick it up since there’s a Utah connection. I noticed that Cloudpiler’s defunct websites were administered by a guy in Provo, Utah. Any newspapers in Provo or Sanpete County might also be good.
Thanks for compiling and sending out info.
yawn
Better Trolls please.
Cloudpiler (Landis) claimed to be the President of the Utah Naturopathic Medical Association. I wonder if the Utah Association of Naturopathic Physicians is aware of the Cloudpiler claim?
See http://www.mesomorphosis.com/blog/2009/03/28/utah-naturopathic-physicians-allowed-to-prescribe-testosterone/ for a news article about naturopaths in Utah (hosted on a drug-manufacturer’s site, it looks like).
In that article, Matthew Burnett, N.D. is identified as the current President of the Utah Association of Naturopathic Physicians
Here’s an excerpt from the article posted on the mesomorphosis.com website:
“The Utah Legislature has approved a bill that would allow naturopathic physicians to prescribe transdermal or buccal testosterone (but not injectable esters of testosterone). The “Hormone Restoration Amendments” (HB-108) passed the Utah Senate on March 9, 2009 and the Utah House on February 10, 2009. Placing the risks of testosterone in perspective, Rep. Paul Ray stated, “I’ve been married 17 years and too much estrogen scares me a heck of a lot more than testosterone.” Utah will become the fifth state to grant prescriptive rights for testosterone to naturopathic physicians when the bill is signed by Gov. Jon Huntsman. Utah joins Arizona, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington as the only other states where naturopathic physicians can prescribe testosterone …”
jbt is just a troll making stuff up. He is a good example of why 13 year olds shouldn’t practice medicine on themselves or anyone else.
The cure rates and survival curves for any of the hundred plus diseases we call cancer are exhaustively documented and available to all on the internet with a few clicks. Modern medicine can do a lot in many or most cases. These are just facts, not opinions or delusions.
All cancer patients will die in the end. So will all noncancer patients. The death rate is still 100%, no fooling. Some consider this a scandal after all the billions NIH has spent on experimental medicine. Damnit, where is my flying car?
What complexity, and how does it affect a 13-year old’s ability to weigh the consequences of his actions?
Quite right too. They’re your property and have no rights of their own.
I´m just a man. have a wife. have kids. i´m not an angry man, well not usually anyway. Sometime my kids pisses me of, but thats ok, hey, they are kids. i have a good job. Working with children. I get so sad reading this blog, sad and happy. I´m a lurker most of the time, listening, learning… This though is where I feel I need to say something.
Something.
That did not help. Maybe if I beliv it will help, it will?
I´m trying to explain to my 8 year old why some parents rather do nothing to save their child from a deadly disease than anything. She doesnt get it, and now she has no more saying, off to bed. I know I will do everything in my power to shield her from religion & superstition, I also know that my antagonism can make her more susceptible to it. What to do? It´s my biggest fear as a father.
I need to adress the issue. In my opinion this constitute a clear violation to sanity. Let me reframe that. I hate these people, I know they are beeing brainwashed, still hating. They have no right giving birth to a child, no right to abuse this child with dogma, no right to deny their child the proper care and no right feeling good aboute it. I know I preach to the choire but I need to sleep.
Landis seems to be a fake Indian running a fake religion to sell fake medicine. OK, routine scam by a twice convicted conman.
So this woman is going to kill her kid on this basis? Darwin award for sure.
Landis if he has any brains should be on the run by now. Hard to count up how many state and federal laws he is breaking here but it is a lot.
Great job by several people tracing this snake’s nest down. Not bad for the evil not-religious.
Re #111 and previous, who was that masked asshole?
Ciao y’all
I agree that it is very bad that woo and religious fervor won out over common sense and science based medicine and a child died as a result.
That said I also think there are other aspects to the story. One is the attitude of parents to child and child to family. A subset of Christian faith holds that children are the tools of the family line. That it isn’t individuals that matter but lineages. Some proportion of claims of people who are ‘pro-family’ fall into this category. This also ties into the whole ‘full quiver’ ideal that children are instrumentalities used to to advance tribe and culture.
That children owe it to their tribe to do their elders bidding and to sacrifice themselves for the ‘family’ when and if they are called to do so. The example of the near-sacrifice of Abraham’s son is set as an example and ideal. The son sent off to war to fight for the family and faith is another aspect.
Another side of this is that people who flock to such sects within Christianity tend to be relatively poor. Those with money before they join are often made poor by the need to contribute to ‘the good work’, often this amounts to making sure the preacher gets the luxuries that are his due.
A family that sees its children as expendable resources that are to be used to advance the cause faces with the cost of treating such a disease might reinterpret the situation as a ‘test of faith’. If the kid dies he is a sacrifice and example of the faith and loyalty to the cause. If he lives he is a ‘miracle’ and ‘proof’ that ‘faith heals’ and the outside world can be ignored.
Either way the ‘family’, in the larger sense, wins. Either way the family doesn’t spend the time, effort and money and these can continue to spread within the local community of faith.
Eh, I might be agreeing with someone branded ‘troll’, but 13 is old enough to have a stake in your healthcare. All kids should have choices where possible, should have as much explained to them as possible and so on. I’m not going to quote historical precendent, because I can quote current things instead. So if you could explain why a thirteen year old in the UK can be considered bright enough (given an opinion on ‘competence’)to make healthcare decisions and American teens are not I’d be most interested. Note that the UK decisions are over twenty years old; the English original is case law, and there is statue law in Scotland. So if you could explain why all your opinions of 13 year olds are so much more accurate than all the people involved in those…?
It varies from child to child how much they can cope with. But treat a kid with maturity, give them the information in a way they can understand, and they will often surprise you with their insight.
Garbage in, garbage out still holds though! A point worth considering might be – perhaps (big perhaps; they might have done this anyway) if people around this kid had explained everything to him, had treated him as part of this decision rather than a chattel of his family (as everyone here wants to, apart from those who want him taken into care), he might have stood up and consented to the treatment whatever his mother said. Just a thought.
jbt@#111: Just in case you stop by again, I’ll leave this note for you.
We’re not bashing Christians here, we’re bashing fake Christians, fake Mormons, fake Native Americans and fake science. At the same time, we’re trying to save a child’s life, very pro-life and all that. This should all mesh with your goals perfectly.
The young boy involved does not have the facts at his disposal. It’s highly likely that his parents have also been duped. The discussion about the boy’s right to make his own decisions is moot if he’s unaware of the facts.
I’ve got no bloody sympathy. People who would let a child die of medical neglect should be staked out and left for the vultures.
One more addition to the pile up of fakes listed above: Cloudpiler (Landis) seems likely to be a fake Naturopath, or at least be faking the presidency of a naturopathic association. Does this add up to a fake faker?
Oh, still left two fakes out of the list: fake business (the pyramid or MLM scheme) and fake history.
1. A conman and a web designer in Provo, Utah concoct a fake Native American tribe out of fake history made up by Joseph Smith and recorded in the Book of Mormon. (Landis and Vincent — but Vincent’s knowledge of fakery is unknown, as the web admin he may have been duped as well).
2. Fake Native American Tribe sells fake medicine and fake tribal memberships.
3. Fake medicine is sold through fraudulent multi-level marketing scheme (fake business).
4. Mormon dogma is wed to pseudo Native American traditions and pretends to be a religion.
5. Said religion results in duped parents, duped 13-year-old boy and delusions that lead to refusing life-saving medical treatment.
Utah legislature is also complicit. They passed the laws legitimizing the Naturopathy Association (the real one, not the fake one). Round and round we go.
Here’s a repeat from my post @#59. Note that the Utah legislature is also complicit in allowing pyramid schemes:
Utah has a reputation for its pyramid schemes. No surprise there.
http://www.pyramidschemealert.org/PSAMain/news/UtahScamState.html
The link is from 2006. Haven’t time to find out yet if Utah still ranks #1 as the Scam State.
This post will be off on a tangent but it is about religious induced stupidity.
Today, I renewed my state ID. I was asked the battery of questions including if I wished to donate my organs. I said yes without much thought about it. If I no longer have need for my organs and if they are in good condition, I want other lives saved if possible.
A little bit later, I am in a store where the clerk taking care of me is wearing an anti-organ donation button. It said:
All I could think is that this person is an incredibly stupid and selfish person. I got away from this person as quickly as I could. I am now wondering, what percentage of the population thinks along the same lines.
There are a few ways to spot a plastic shaman:
1. Use of the word “shaman”. “Shaman” is not a Native American word, and real American Indians don’t use it.
2. Mixing ‘n matching various traditions. Mixing tribal beliefs and traditions is common among plastic shamans (because they’re stupid racists who don’t bother to learn the difference between tribes and probably don’t think there even *is* a difference), but a major red flag is mixing Native American beliefs with Eastern or European beliefs.
3. Offers to teach other people. You don’t sign up to be a medicine man; you’re chosen for the role, and it’s a responsibility that must not be taken lightly. You especially don’t learn to be a medicine man in the course of a weekend.
4. Charging for services. This is a HUGE red flag. Making money off of spiritual guidance and all that stuff is a major no-no. It is totally unacceptable. It’s like using a cross for a dildo.
Add another fake to your list.
Those Native American herbs are likely to be fake too. Why bother collecting pine bark, sagebrush, cactus juice or whatever when you can just toss in some lawn clippings and carrots or whatnot.
Not saying these herbal preparations aren’t what they are labeled to be because I simply don’t know or care. But given the history of Landis, wouldn’t bet on it either.
.Utah used to be known as the penny stock scam capital of the world. A few decades ago the feds set up offices to clean it up a little.
It might be better now but not by much. Current capitals include Nevada, Florida, and Utah is still in the running.
This story exemplifies the essential evil of religion.
This is not a case of wicked people using religion as an excuse to be cruel. I’m sure these parents genuinely wanted the best for their child and weren’t in any obscene hurry to send him to Heaven.
If only those parents had more faith in human wisdom.
What “normal” religious people do — Have faith in human wisdom and give God the credit when it turns out well. That may be intellectually dishonest and philosophically inconsistent, but it’s far better than really really really believing.
wow, i found what follows here: http://www.feministmormonhousewives.org/?p=72
Your comments about me are absolutely true. I was convicted in two associated trials. In Montana, I was convicted of Theft by Deception and Deceptive Business Practices and sentenced to two concurrent 10 year terms. However, the judge in the matter saw me as such a dangerous criminal that he required only thirty days of that sentence to be served in the county jail. The rest of the sentence was suspended. With all your hard information on the case itself, perhaps you ought to take a look at the actual evidence. Your “research” might be credible then. I don’t believe you would justify yourself in it and you might even feel a twinge over what you have so far written about me.
The second case was in Idaho. I plead No – Constere and was sentenced to two years in the Idaho State Penitentiary. The Judge in that case saw me as such a dangerous repeat offender that he entered a withheld judgment and I served four months in North Idaho Correctional Institution (boot camp). He demanded no restitution in the matter. When I have completed all the probation requirements, he will dismiss the case and it will be as if it never happened.
A default judgment was entered against me in civil court awarding some $600,000.00 which the State of Idaho immediately wrote off as bad debt. There has been no attempt to collect since the sentence was entered.
Now, as for my “Cult,” I am flattered. Cult simply means a group of people who meet together for ceremonial and religious purposes. If I have a Cult, then it is complimentary to us. We are engaging. I’m not sure what you are doing.
I do reccommend that all Mormons refrain from reading the Mentinah Archives. I do disclose to everybody who hears me speak that I am a double felon. I have no hangups over who or what I am. You do seem to be hung up over me. Please rest easy.
Your intentions seem to be to protect others from fraud. That sounds noble. So, with all your legal research, can it have been lost on you that fraud requires certain necessary issues, such as, opportunity, injurred parties, actual commission of offense under the law, and last but not least, monitary damages. If you are accusing me of fraud in the matter of the Mentinah Archives, you might want to provide some of those items. Otherwise, what you are writing could be as easily described as slander and libel. Now, you may feel justified in that little bit of injury upon your neighbor. After all, you can’t be convicted of felony for it, and that seems to be your sounding rod.
Or, you might want to get over it.
Cloudpiler
Elected Hereditary Medicine Chief
Nemenhah Band and Native American Traditional Organization
Board Certified Naturopath
Native American Practitioner
Former Pres. Utah Naturopathic Medical Association
Medicine Man, Roadman, Spiritual Leader (Native American Church)
Double Felon
Father
Sculptor
Gardiner
etc. and I can’t think of anything else, but you’ll probably think of something nastier.
Comment by Phillip R. Landis AKA Cloudpiler — April 15, 2006 @ 9:16 pm
i got there by googling “Utah Naturopathic Medical Association” -i think it’s an association he created himself, as it has no website of its own and isn’t found on any sites not talking about him. these “Mentinah Archives” he “translated” seem to be quite controversial in LDS circles, i know nothing about them (something else to google).
he is a con-man. he even has whole websites pushing you to buy his supplements for your pets.
i did email the Salt Lake Tribune (as per Lynna’s suggestion) and the author of the minneapolis star-tribune hauser article about all this. i really hope that at least one of them runs with the “cloudpiler/nemenhah” angle on poor daniel’s story. whether or not you think i 13 year-old should be making life and death decisions, both he and his family deserve the truth about these “native herbs” they think can save him before they make such a decision.
.
What if you are cremated? Or in a plane that crashes and burns? Or a lion eats you for dinner? Or your organ gets cancer and disintegrates? Or is removed for cancer or other pathology? Do these people just go to hell without any organs or even heads and brains?
Probably just another religious kook. They come up like mushrooms after a long rain.
God sure has a lot of arbitrary rules about who gets in the afterlife.
Chief Joseph had one child, a daughter named Kapkap Ponmi (Noise of Running Feet) (also called Sarah) who survived to adulthood. His other three daughters and five sons died in childhood. Sarah was born in 1865, and she had no children.
None of Joseph’s other three wives had children that survived to adulthood that I can trace.
check this out:http://provopulse.com/?q=node/1538
“Submitted by UVM on Wed, 06/07/2006 – 7:08pm. Religion
Do you guys think this is a hoax, or does this guy (or group) really believe all this shtuff?
http://mentinah.com/
Volume 1
Book of Hagoth
Hagoth built ships and departed from the Land Southward with his family and twelve Nephite and twelve Ammonite families. They traveled north along the Pacific coastline to the mouth of the Colorado River, up the Colorado River to the area now known as Four Corners where they settled for a time. They became known as the Nemenhah people. They left the Four Corners area and established two new settlements – one on the plains area and the other further north in the mountains where they remained undefiled by the Gadiantonem Robbers.
Book of Hagmeni
Hagmeni, the son of Hagoth, discovered ancient tombs and records of the Jaredites. He was ordained Prophet and High Priest of the Nemenhah by Nephi the Prophet from Zarahemla. He spoke with Christ in the temple. Samuel the Lamanite, on returning from the Land Southward, spent the winter with the Nemenhah in the land of Mentinah.”
emphasis mine. “native americans” my ass! the more i learn the worse it gets… the finder/translator of this “book” is our friend cloudpiler landis. some of the native posts about him call him “crap-piler,” and the reasons should be obvious.
Religions have a long history of forgeries and frauds. The xian religion has enough pieces of the True Cross running around to build a city. Part of the Reformation was about the traffic in Saints relics for magical purposes. Quite often they were just animal bones or random pieces of some random corpse.
IIRC, the LDS church has had its share of people discovering old archives written in unknown languages and translating them by supernatural aids. It seems to me there was something about disappearing gold plates in New York.
Tsu Dho Nimh-
landis claims that he (or his parent? unclear) was granted death-bed inclusion into the family by her as part of the “making family” tradition, so a “spiritual” rather than blood affiliation.
in other cases of “tribal inclusion rights” such supposed “death-bed family” stories have not held up in court.
jbt #81
Kids with cystic fibrosis are alowed to refuse a second transplant as by then they have a full understanding of the reality of the disease and of its treatment. They have spent years in hospital, taken shedloads of medication and know exactly what a second transplant will be like.
Survival rates from second transplant are not good – and they certainly bear no comparison with the 95% survival for HL.
Children with lifelong chronic disorders have a comprehension of treatment which this child lacks. I’m wiling to bet that this child started treatment with his parents telling him he’d feel terrible, then they pounced on every minor complaint and magnified it a thousandfold. This kid will have a horrendous time with chemo because he doesn’t have parents who will support him, find distractions for him, or acentuate the positive about treatment.
In this situation it’s perfectly logical that he’s terrified and refusing treatment.
Opposed as I am to capital punishment, I would gladly support it for her and others like her that willing kill their children by withholding tried and proven medical treatment from their children.
Tassie Devil:
The same is true most places for kids with cancers that are either unresponsive or recur after treatments. I dealt with one program for cancer kids in another state that had counselors trained and sensitive enough to work with kids and parents in such situations where the child had had enough, the parents were still desperate for an unlikely cure. Terribly sad and heartbreaking, but shit happens. That’s a hell of a job – I wouldn’t want it!
I understand that this form of cancer has a spectacular “cure” (5 years or more) rate. That’s quite the wonderful development after so many years of “nothing we can do.” But I am not this mother or child, nor am his doctor or the judge in this case (kid had a one-on-one in chambers today according to the story). What can be addressed will, I’m willing to allow, be decided on best principles. I doubt anyone involved would like this child to die.
That’s why I’m glad the judge arranged for an in-chamber one-on-one rather than requiring testimony in open court. All this kid has to do is waver, the judge will have him back in treatment post haste. But remember the boy has already undergone a treatment regimen – he’s still bald from it. I don’t know whether he can grasp the difference between suffering and death, that’s why there’s a judge. But that’s not why the dittoheads here are up in arms. If it were not a religious appeal, they’d all be ranting about something else on another thread.
jbt-
have you not read and understood that the “religion” this family was duped into subscribing to is a false “native faith” created by one non-native man based on a claimed translation of a “lost” mormon text he alone “translated” and that the official LDS church doesn’t accept?
and did you catch that this “religion” preaches that western medicine is bad but the “native supplements” sold directly by the MLM distribution company he himself created are good and can cure cancer?
these people are victims of fraud (oh yeah, the guy Phillip R. Landis, N.D. AKA Cloudpiler, already has lost several different fruad suits in at least 2 states).
how do you think that this doesn’t matter?
you think it’s ok for some guy to invent a “religion” and pass it off as “native wisdom” to sell naturalpathic supplements, and after charging this kid a $90 fee plus $5/month forever he’s informed the child that he is now a “medicine man” too? if you have no problems with this perhaps you are a fellow con-man/woman.
the fact that real native groups and mainstream LDS members alike see through this man is a big red flag too.
this is not about a religious conviction against medical treatment, this is about tricking desperate people to make money!
Theoretically, children’s aid societies can protect children from their parents. If a pregnant woman might take illegal drugs, some jurisdictions will lock her up to protect her fetus. But if parents invoke religious privilege, that seems to trump child protection. Unless it’s a _foreign_ tradition, such as female genital mutilation.
If he is actually making claims that nutritional supplements for sale can cure cancer, he is going back to jail. That is illegal and the feds prosecute that one.
Nutritional supplement companies are not allowed to make claims about efficacy without clinical trial data. That is why they always use vague language like, “boosts the immune system” and “some users believe it produces sleep.”
I just celebrated my fifth year Hodgkins free. I was able to use the internet to research the treatments and get myself into a phase 3 clinical trial for the Stanford V protocol. I was diagnosed in my 30’s. Since then, I left my office job, went back to school, and now work in a cancer clinic. I wish there was something I could do to convince them to go through with the treatment. The state really needs to step in on this one.
Hmm, Dr. Schulze or Dr. Rowen? Of course it might be neither but those are the two idiots my family follows. Thankfully, cancer is pretty rare in the family. If I knew more about psychology I might offer up some explanation about how these quacks can get such a hold on people. On the upside, I get free “energized” water to take home with me anytime I go visit.
luna1580:
‘Religions’ like this are all frauds far as I can tell, most non-stoned or brainwashed “believers” don’t care. Mom found this on the internet, for goodness’ sake! Just like the internet “Universal Life” church that gives out clergy certificates so people can perform marriages.
I have seen no evidence that it’s not a convenience picked up by Mom (or kid) just so they’d have a defensible appeal when the state came knocking. If the judge decides that this ‘religion’ doesn’t qualify, then the teen will be forced into treatment whether he wants it or not. Conversely, the judge may find that the boy knows the score, and should be allowed to decide for himself (regardless of reason). Or s/he might decide it’s a real religion and they’re real believers, and send them home to do as they please.
I don’t know the outcome. Do you? What I have seen over too many years is a lot of suffering and expense and death at the end, with a shrug from the well-paid doctors saying, “well, we tried! Too bad it didn’t work…” This cancer has a much better than average cure rate, they say. I’m sure the Mom and son are aware of this, they’ve sat through all the doctors’ testimony. This isn’t an emergency, he’s not bleeding to death for want of a blood transfusion.
I’m reluctant to force any particular treatments for chronic or terminal diseases on anyone, though I very much support all effective treatments being available to everyone who needs and wants them. Until we have the latter, the former seems highly hypocritical to me.
raven, i don’t know for a fact if landis has ever claimed he could cure cancer, as all of the sites related to him are down or being mysteriously “updated.” i do know that his supplements were tied to a “hulda clark” naturopathic guru in my searches. she herself might not officially claim she can cure cancer, but her lay people supporters sure as hell do in the form of testimonials that can’t be proven. and she sources her “treatments” out of mexico, just in case…
http://quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Cancer/clark.html
i would like to know what year his first “translation” of the “book of hagoth” was released, and more history on the nemenhah movement, but it’s hard to find. i found one thing proclaiming that a group of people in utah were creating a town based on it and this “mentinah” but it was an old item and its links were dead, i’m not motivated enough to search for archives.
i do know that daniel hauser’s mom said in a newspaper article that they’ve been involved with nemenhah as a religion for 18 years even though she came from a family of catholics.
so 18 years for her and her husband, and all 13 of daniel’s life, would boil down to them paying $3180 in “voluntary dues” so far to maintain their memberships. not much for all that time, but we have no idea how much they’ve also spent on supplements and vitamins over all that time. and now they my give their son’s life. this is unacceptable and it’s shameful that this is being described as a “native” belief system in all the press (so far, fingers crossed).
Mexico is a veritable fountain of medical quackery. Nothing like the FDA exists there. A huge red flag when someone shows up with “medicine” from Mexico.
The cops near me arrested someone for IV infusing quack medicine from Mexico into cancer patients. Turned out it was saline (salt water) contaminated with traces of organic matter. The organic matter turned out to be live bacteria. The stuff wasn’t even sterile. Cancer patients are debilitated and often immune suppressed. Introducing live bacteria IV can easily set off septic shock leading to death. People die from this sort of fraud.
If his website is dark, he is probably scrubbing it with a lawyer. And if this cult is decades old, who knows how many people have already died an unnecessary and early death?
Lots of stupid comments in this thread,the worst by far from the obtuse goalpost shifter jbt.
As much as I dont like religion,this case is about a fake religion, a mixture of mormon and fake-native cult,as neatly established above,so this one is not about bashing religion.Please.
To me it’s clear that a 13yo is not competent to decide his/her own healthcare,see the nice laceration example above,where the kid is terrified and refuses treatment,which is just not an option.In the case of a skin wound,almost all parents will consent to him being sedated and treated while asleep.
Sounds to me this family needs some psychological help to work on their anxiety issues about the Chemo,a court order should be the last resort.
And can I just say,I find the Darwin awards disgusting and stupid,and the comments here regarding “removing himself from the genepool” etc. in this context misplaced and tasteless.
oh, and when i was wondering how much the family has been charged over the years in “offering” i forgot: daniel is only one of the hauser’s 8 children…
http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/fromcomments/292042.php
http://www.mankatofreepress.com/local/local_story_128230205.html?keyword=topstory
they’ve so been lured into a den of “natural” quackery, since the articles above make much of how they’re “starving out” his cancer and treating him with -you guessed it- “special waters” that will “change the pH” of his body. and they think is x-rays are somehow wrong. as the child has been brought up this way all his life, i have no doubts at all that it’s his own idea to reject additional rounds of chemo, but i also think he really believes that all he’s been told about “magic pH water” etc. is true and can really save him. damn, i hope the someone is telling that judge some of this side of the story.
i don’t think it’s any kind of coincidence that everything directly related to cloudpiler, landis, nemenhah, and mentinah are dark, i can’t be the only one in america doing the searches i did today and landis must know it. methinks there is a crime in here somewhere (and no, not with the parents).
Has anyone pointed out yet that many chemotherapy drugs are derived from plants? Vincristine, vinblastine, paclitaxel, docetaxel, a few antibiotics that come from fungus as well…aren’t those natural enough? If vitamins extracted from plants are okay, surely alkaloids extracted from plants are okay…
and speaking of fraud and lawyers, landis and the “nemenhah” are definitely prepared to hide behind the Federal Native American Free Exercise of Religion Act of 1993 (NAFERA).
“According to Dan Zwakman [the hauser spokesperson], those spiritual values go along with a band of Native Americans called “Namenha” which Danny has been adopted into. Since chemotherapy, he has been undergoing a form of natural treatment consistent with their beliefs. Dan Zwakman says, “We believe in natural healing and the ability to make our own choice.” Zwakman is a member of that same band and says the natural treatment Danny has been receiving is working and forcing him to undergo chemotherapy would be a giant blow to Native Americans everywhere. Dan Zwakman
says, “This is going to gave a national impact. This could adversely affect Native Americans and our religious beliefs and their religious freedoms in this country.”
http://www.keyc.com/node/21364
“At the press conference Thursday, Dan Zwakman, a member of the Nemenhah band from Minnesota, said the case concerns a 1993 law called the Native American Free Exercise of Religion Act that gives Native Americans freedoms and rights to practice their religion.
“What this court seems to be neglecting is this law entirely. You can look at us, you can say we don’t look Native American and you’re correct, for the most part. Danny and his mother have been adopted into the Nemenhah band,” he said. “We have full legal rights as if we were Native American.”
He said the band’s members view medicine as a strongly-held religious belief, which was upheld by the Supreme Court.
“We’re looking upon this as an extension of our religion as if this child was an Amish child or a Jehovah’s Witness child,” Zwakman said.
Susan Daya Hamwi, an attorney from Marina del Rey, Calif., and a Nemenhah member, who came to New Ulm to support the Hauser family, said the case is also about freedom of choice and about how people care for their bodies.
“Beyond the Nemenhah, we believe everyone should have the right to choose,” she said. “We see cancer rates going up every year. Clearly, (chemotherapy) is not working for everyone.”
While the Hausers have practiced traditional medicine for 18 years, Colleen said they discovered the Nemenhah a year ago through a friend.
“It just fit into what we do,” she said.
Hamwi said the band has lodges around the country and has 65 members in Minnesota. She and the Hausers said they were unsure how many members the band has across the U.S.
Hamwi said the Hausers’ case is similar to a previous one that she represented.
She cited the case of 17 year-old Chad Jessop in Orange County, Calif., who is also a Nemenhah member. Hamwi said the case was eventually dismissed after the judge could not find a doctor who would enforce the court-ordered treatment.”
http://www.nujournal.com/page/content.detail/id/506813.html
using native rights to protect the teachings (and sales!) of a non-native man’s “religion” and supplement business! i may need to go throw-up now. that last link has more info about it….
Many of the plants materials need to be chemically modified for best effect. We call them semi-synthetic.
So now you’ve moved from ‘everyone I know with cancer died’ to ‘I understand this cancer has a spectacular cure rate’
It is pointless discussing any issue with someone who doesn’t have the balls to back up the position the y have taken, instead constantly shifting their ground and blaming everyone else for not understanding the points you are supposedly trying to make.
You have absolutely no authority that can add anything of worth to this discussion, and you do not actually have a point to make either.
jbt,
There are several things you need to understand:
1) This is his first treatment – ABVD is usually given as 6 cycles, 4 weeks each so if the kid was diagnosed in January, then this is his first line treatment & would not have finished until July. Do not compare this to long term illnesses which individuals have by time and necessity learned to cope with. This is not third line therapy or something we don’t know how to treat. This is a basic fear response.
2) For all the medical disparities in this country, we do take care of our kids for the very reason that it’s not very good press to say ‘choose between one of your kids living & the rest not eating’. SCHIP covers all costs pertaining to cancer care in under 18yos, so your thought of not wanting to bankrupt his family is patently false.
3) All – and I mean all – people should have some autonomy over the course of their care because it helps with patient’s sense of hope, control of pain and ability to carry out the rest of their lives with at least the perception of control. However, this usually doesn’t mean asking a 13 yo if they want chemo. Like when you examine a child’s ears, you never as ‘can I look in your ears?’, you say ‘which ear would you like me to look in first?’. The patient maintains a sense of control and the doc gets her job done. The question for a 13yo is usually something like: do you want more kyril? would you prefer chemo in the evening or morning? do you not like the steroids (a nausea control agent in this case, not part of the chemo reg)? Again, the patient can maintain a sense of control and the doc gets to save his life.
4) Lastly, I hope you understand that this is what woo-misters do. They take the sick and the frightened and promise them miracles. I have seen a patient where she presented (as an adult) with DCIS (pre-cancerous breast cancer – which is treated by out-patient surgery alone, no rads, no chemo) that got taken in by a religious herbalist for years. I was part of the team that removed the mass that had fungated (grown out of her skin), necrosed and putrefied (died and rotted) on her chest. To see that happen to a child, and a 13 yo is a child in post-industrial society, makes me nauseated. His parents should be protecting him – and if they won’t, we will. We as a society have to – because a society is defined by how it treats it’s most vulnerable members.
I hope you don’t think of yourself a patient advocate, because you’re a piss poor one.
i posted info here today as i found it, so if you see a contradiction -like they practiced a nemenhah religion for 18 years vs. they been into naturopathic healing for 18 years but only came to find the nemenhah way a year ago through i friend- go with the most recent thing (the latter, in my example).
this case is upsetting on SO many levels: religion vs. science, real religion vs. fraud, scientific medicine vs. fraud, profit motive vs. health and life, and finally genuine native rights vs. some more fraud! i’m sorry to have commented so much, but so many of these issues are very important to me.
I’m a cancer survivor. I had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It is in remission because I didn’t rely on religious superstition to cure me. I listened to my oncologist and underwent chemotherapy for the illness. I feel 100% healthy again. I never doubted the treatment prescribed by my doctor.
I also never prayed once.
A thirteen year old child is not able to decide for himself the best medical course of action. If the parent abdicates reason in favor of superstition they deserve to have their parental rights overridden and the child should be treated, albeit against his woefully uninformed wishes.
Failing that, in the event of the child’s death the parents, and the minister advising them, should face criminal charges.
jbt-
“I don’t know the outcome. Do you?”
no one does, it’s in the courts at this very moment. and it’s a DAMN shame that they’ve roped legitimate native rights into this court battle for some white minnesotan farm folk of catholic stock and naturopathic tendencies with a sick kid.
real religion vs. fraud
hmm…
that’s a toughie.
can I have a couple thousand years to decide if ANY are “real”?
I wrote something similar myself upthread and hesitated before posting,I guess a better way of saying it would be established religion vs money-making scam posing as religious cult,or something like that…..Bummer,still not quite right…..Let me think about it a bit more..:-)
Ichthyic-
i knew that would come up.
i’m an atheist myself. still, i recognize a profound difference between genuine native beliefs tied to the cultures and languages of different actual tribes (no, there is not some generic “native way” in any indian reality) and a weird mormon/native hybrid concocted to support this man’s naturopath business plan!
surely you do too?
indian beliefs may or may not be be as faulty in their assessment of divinity as any other religion on the globe, but at least we should give the actual cultural traditions credit for being just that, and not being some concocted hodgepodge of native traditions, “mormon texts,” naturopathy, and eastern medicine that might make some MLM scam a buck?
luna @#155 quotes some sources that mention Chad Jessop. Jessop is a family name with a long history in the LDS Church, and in the FLDS. If you google Jessop you’ll find some references to Mormons who participate in the Tabernacle Choir and who are relatively famous in mormondom.
Warren Jeffs of the FLDS sect married a 14 year-old Jessop girl (or married her to another older man? I’ll have to check that again). See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkiG_DFWZwQ
lynna-
if i’m reading you right you’re saying that members of their legal team and/or the sited cases the are using as precedent have ties to people in the FLDS?
can you elaborate?
i know about the FLDS and jeffs, and they scare me! as i recall (without googling it) jeffs was busted for “facilitating statuary rape” amongst other things. he definitely presided over the “spiritual marriage” of at least one 14 year old girl to her much older and already polygamously married first cousin. he was on the FBI’s most wanted list when they finally apprehended him.
if there is a real link between the “nemenhah” and him it’s worse than i’d thought (and i didn’t think that was possible).
Tassie:
??? Where is the conflict you’re pretending to see? Everyone I’ve ever known who had cancer died of cancer, with or without treatment (except me and I was only seven, what does a seven-year old know?). They say they can ‘cure’ this cancer ~90+ percent of the time. That’s great, it’s what the judge, this Mom and son, and everyone else in the courtroom has been told. I have no personal experience with that, accept the medical prognosis as given. I presume the judge does too.
So… you’re an authority about this boy and his situation – did you testify in this case? I am presuming the judge is weighing the matters quite carefully, will decide based on legal precedent. I’d suggest you’re wasting your time here if you feel more qualified to judge the case than the jurist in charge. If you really think the judge will rule erroneously, perhaps you and Dr. Fabulous can petition for appeal based on your desire for the boy to be forced into treatment.
Dr. Fabulous:
No, I don’t think of myself as a patient advocate. Luckily enough, as I’d make a lousy one. The young man in this case has doctors who cared enough to go to court to try and force him into treatment. The issue is whether he can or should be forced into treatment. At least, that’s what I got from the story. Most everyone here seems to agree that he must be forced into treatment because they don’t like the reasons for his refusal. I am not so sure, but since I’m not the judge, that’s not an issue.
Anonymous:
Do Native Americans routinely deny medical care to their children? That seems rather odd (I never heard of such a thing), but then again, there are sects out there who do. And if this pseudo-cult is so powerfully against medical care, how come the boy has an oncologist trying to force him BACK into treatment?
Somehow, I suspect the judge will weigh this recent affiliation and late objection in making the eventual ruling. Don’t let reality interfere with the outrage, though.
whoops. I think I included a Ruby Jessop link that was not the one I intended to include. Here’s the one I meant to include:
http://helpthechildbrides.com/
Another famous Jessop is Carolyn. See
http://fora.tv/2007/12/05/Carolyn_Jessop_on_her_Escape_from_the_FLDS
It’s likely that someone in the LDS or FLDS Jessop extended family knows the Chad Jessop mentioned in the source luna quoted @155. Mormons are really big on keeping in touch with all their family members.
I have a feeling the mormon roots on this story will be found to go deeper than we are currently seeing..
surely you do too?
nope.
all i see is a time differential.
There is really no way of telling if, given a thousand years, scientology would end up being considered a “real” religion, even though many would remember how and why it started.
How do we know that any currently “ancient” religion really didn’t start the same way: As a simple scam to create “non-disposable” members of a society that essentially did no work? Or as a way to increase one’s mating potential?
The line is only clear when we have a relatively recent, well documented, example.
Frankly, I haven’t seen any recent examples that were based on anything BUT scams.
you?
“and it’s a DAMN shame that they’ve roped legitimate native rights into this court battle for some white minnesotan farm folk of catholic stock and naturopathic tendencies with a sick kid.
-Do Native Americans routinely deny medical care to their children? That seems rather odd (I never heard of such a thing)-”
NO, they DO NOT.
that is all part of why it will be an outrage for this “band” of “natively adopted” “nemenhah” to use the Federal Native American Free Exercise of Religion Act of 1993 (NAFERA) in any way to defend this family’s “religious” opposition to chemotherapy.
that law wasn’t put on the books to protect white naturopaths from fraud charges by allowing them to practice outside the realm of legal review. it is an OUTRAGE against real native peoples for them to try to do so. (apparently as they’ve done before…)
and i think the family is an unwitting victim in all this, i doubt they know the true history of phillip landis “creating” the “nemenhah independent native band” through unsubstantiated “family-making” death-bed oaths and his “mormon” “translations.”
if you want to know more please take the time to follow the links in my earlier comments, or just try this one:
http://64.38.12.138/boardx/post.asp?method=TopicQuote&TOPIC_ID=37072&FORUM_ID=5
it’s complete with dead links to “the nemenhah” that real natives are trying to follow… it’s just gross.
Everyone I’ve ever known who had cancer died of cancer
umm, you do realize there are many different kinds of cancers, right?
not all cancer is fatal, and the ones that are have quite variable rates of survivability.
saying the form under discussion HERE has a 95% survivability rate with treatment is basically saying it is quite readily curable.
Another interesting fact that luna dug up was the connection with natural medicines coming from Mexico. There are FLDS communities in Mexico, holdovers from the time when the LDS Church supposedly rejected polygamy, but the church authorities worded the pronouncement in such a way that polygamists could interpret it to mean that they had to live by the laws of the USA only if they lived within the borders of the USA — some moved to Mexico and others moved to Canada where they continued to practice polygamy, and they still do so today.
Could just be coincidence, but there are enough signs of connection with fringe mormons that the FLDS should be looked at.
PZ-
is it too much to ask that you make a new post revealing the faux-native fraudulent naturopath and possible FLDS components of this case? if you read through all these comments and follow the links it becomes clear, but i’d also be willing to email you a concise summery (with links sited) if you’d like.
luna
On a lighter note, and OT, we can always tell what the mormon prophet is thinking about by what events are planned at the local churches. Today the Rexburg Church is hosting a 2009 Anti-Pornography Symposium. Wasn’t too long ago that PZ blogged about stats from porn sites showing that Utah had the highest per capita sign-up-and-pay rate on online porn sites. The anti-porn campaign also extends to the evils of the internet in general.
Well, Dan, when does the unnecessary death of a youth become too much for even you to bear? When does the rigor of treatment put the patient in jeopardy? At what point does human life become less valuable than your belief in an Invisible Supernatural Spook that continues to not show up?
Riddle me that.
Janine @#129: the “don’t give away your organs…” button is really creepy. What state were you in?
And I think we concluded in that thread that this showed nothing other than that they are just too dumb to find the free porn on the net in Utah.
jbt being more obtuse:
We all die of something eventually.Difference between dying with cancer,or of cancer ever occurred to you?You argue a lot from personal anecdotes and ignorance,not good reasoning at all.To put it friendly.
Premeditated murder by neglect, pure and simple.
luna@#166: I’m just speculating on the FLDS connection. I wish we knew an insider we could ask. Mexico, Jessop name, pyramid scheme, goofy woo medicines, revelations from supposedly old mormon documents/records related to the Lamanites, sneaky use of laws related to Native Americans, Landis making up stories in the Joseph Smith tradition, big families with lots of kids…well, it all makes me wonder. The scattered bands of people, but with all of the bands tightly connected and in communication with each other — that’s another match. Kind of like a fingerprint.
All speculation, though. Sorry.
Turns out Orac posted on scienceblogs about the Chad Jessop story:
See http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/11/why_would_i_promote_a_hoax.php
See excerpt below — read more at the link above
Lee Woodard on the Chad Jessop melanoma story: “Why would I promote a hoax?”
Category: Alternative medicine • Cancer • Medicine • Quackery
Posted on: November 17, 2007 10:56 AM, by Orac
Ever since I started blogging about a story about a youth named Chad Jessop who, it was claimed, developed melanoma and cured himself of it with “natural” remedies, with the result that his mother was supposedly brought before the Orange County Superior Court and his mother thrown in maximum security prison and denied the right to hire her own attorney, I’ve been fascinated at the contortions of the person most recently responsible for spreading this story, a blogger who goes under the pseudonym of the Angry Scientist. For one thing, the first person to spread this story by e-mail, Thomas Cowles II, seems, after a pathetic attempt to defend the story, to have let it drop, having been called out for using the story to raise funds.
jbt opines:
So… you’re an authority about this boy and his situation – did you testify in this case?
Setting up strawmen won’t help you. It is possible to speak with some authority about the treatment and prognosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma when you work as a doctor in clinical medicine. It is also possible to speak with authority when you see how parents who ‘don’t believe’ in medicine lie to their children until the kids piss themselves with terror when a doctor comes near them.
This child hasn’t a hope of making an informed decision when all he’s heard from his parents is that the doctors are going to inject poisons into him that will make him feel really sick and probably kill him anyway.
I don’t know why I’m trying, but here goes . . .
@jbt,
Just thought I’d try to step back a little from the hubbub and think about your apparent paticular objections to the views presented here in the comments.
You seem to me to be saying that the religious nature of the refusal of treatment is what has all us “lockstep” pharyngulites up in arms.
I think that you are mistaken.
If, instead of pleading a religious feeling that some weird crap that won’t work wold save their son, the parents had explained that their belief in the “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum physics led them to stop treatment due to the inevitable survival of their son in many possible universes, the response here would be exactly the same: punch the parents in the face, then punch them in the gonads, then treat their child against their will and his.
Even though the many-worlds theory can be defended with numbing mathematical rigor by people with even more degrees than medical doctors, I can not think of a single person here who would opine that the math overruled this child’s life in this particular reality.
If the above scenario happened with regularity, I have no doubt that the commenters here would point out the many-worlds theory’s capacity for harm, as they’ve pointed out various belief systems’s capacity for harm.
Difference is, physics doesn’t make parents ignore the needs of their children. Physicists are actually shown to be much more in tune with their own emotions and feelings than these religiously misled douche-bags.
I want to point out that the really damning bit of evidence that these parents should be punched in the ‘nads for years by everyone who has ever had a loved one afflicted with cancer is not that they are trying “natural remedies”.
It is that they are refusing other remedies. The fact that they are steadfastly refusing a treatment recommended to them by reliable authorities as being useful would be damning if they refused to rub their kid with magic oil, if it was not contraindicated by another authority. I don’t know if their “belief-system-perpetrator” specifically advises against real medicine (if he or she does, arrest and flog them), but if it does not specifically list the exact chemotherapy compounds used as being forbidden, then that parents are just ignoring a possible cure.
I know, I know, in this case there is a proven treatment, and my theory would apply to any old bullshit, but I’m a dad. And if any of my kids were deathly ill, and an authority on their disease suggested that your “spleen-juice” might help, you better run, cause I’m taking your spleen.
I just find that, in cases like these, real medical professionals are willing to always say “well, if you want to also explore homeopathic treatments, that’s fine, as long as you continue these allopathic (how would a doctor keep a straight face?) treatments”.
It’s always the bullshit sellers who are the ones to proclaim all other treatments as useless and harmful.
Sorry for the cynicism but, as someone told me, american parents own their children, and thus they only can decide what is good for their children, so, what is this fuss about ? They’ve decided that dying from cancer is better than chemotherapy for their child, so what do you want from them ? To do something worse to their child ? How do you dare ? Nobody tells you what to do with your property, so why do you think you have any right to tell someone else what he should do with his ?
< / parody >
But now, seriously. What do you all want to do against parents who hurt their children by their delusions ? Not only this case, but in general ? What about explicitely changing child abuse laws so that this behavior is illegal ?
Autumn at #183 makes the point I have also noticed, they apparently want their child to live, not die. The fact that they are using methods with no repeat no history of efficacy is the issue to me. It is for this reason that I believe the courts should look into taking custody for the young man’s treatment away from the parents. He is a human, a minor to be sure, but his parents do not own him.
As to individual liberty, I do not believe a 13 year old, especially one immersed in a woo-woo environment, can make a sound judgment at this point. I think someone that age should have the right to request to refuse all treatment and say they wish to die once they have examined all aspects of treatment and can convince people they do not wish to continue with treatment. I also recognize this is a difficult issue to resolve, right to die, for a minor. That all being said, this young man is willing to take the juice of the magic moon plant, so apparently wishes to live.
As to the reality or non of Native American methods/religious beliefs, they are no more real to me than any other and deserve no more respect than mainstream catholic or scientology. The fact that this little cult is engaged in apparent fraud, or at least the leader is, is a legal issue and one that a judge should consider when deciding whether to remove this youngster from his parent’s care. The value of the belief system should be ignored as it should be in all cases. Simply put, freedom of religious belief should have no place in this case and there are numerous precedents for overriding the religious views of JWs and others to protect and treat minors (mentioned several times above).
As for jbt, his views can pretty much be summed up by a phrase from Terry Pratchett’s Foul Ole Ron – “Buggrit, millennium hand and shrimp”.
Ciao y’all
I recently had to argue with some anti-vaxers (they tried to get my wife, but luckily she’s smart enough to know evidence when she sees it…) so I got some real insight into the mind of the woo-ers. I want to quote this from PZ’s post, emphasis mine:
“””
If one of my kids was deadly ill, and I had a doctor who was telling me that she has a very good treatment, and she can tell me how it works, and she could show my statistics and clinical trials that backed up her claims…
“””
The problem with the woo-ites is that they stop before the boldface. If we start with someone who has a powerful mistrust of anything mainstream (in itself not necessarily a bad thing — question everything, after all!) and if we leave off the bold-faced text from the quote above, then the choice becomes “someone whose motives I suspect telling me that she has a very good treatment vs. some who I think is really cool and fun telling me that he has a very good treatment”. Then you can see where they go awry.
This is a point that needs to be hammered home again and again. Even if you don’t understand a whit of science — and therefore may have to accept some of it’s claims “on faith” of a sort — there is still a big difference between that and religion. If you ask a scientist “why”, she’ll usually tell you, even if you don’t understand it all. If you ask a priest “why”, he’ll say that God works in mysterious ways.
One of the potentially great things about the internet is that it has given people a real distrust of “experts”. That’s right, I said it is a potentially great thing. Sometimes the experts are wrong and use their authority to try and deceive us for their own gain, or sometimes just because they happen to be mistaken themselves. The internet has the power to erode the argument from authority.
The problem, as I like to describe it, is “undiscriminating dissent”. It is good to have a healthy mistrust of the mainstream, but only if one is discriminating in what one rejects. Undiscriminating rejection of the mainstream will mean you are wrong more often than you are right.
My wife asked me an interesting question: She said, “Who do you think is worse? The anti-vaxers who asked questions and came to the wrong conclusion? Or the masses of people who never even asked any questions, who have no idea what the cost/benefits are, and just went along with what they were told?” I thought for at least a couple of minutes… if I don’t sufficiently criticize the latter, that’s opens the door for a sort of Nuremberg defense fallacy, i.e. saying that it is okay to blindly follow whatever you are told. But after thinking about it for a minute, I came to the conclusion that, in my mind, “undiscriminating dissent” is actually worse than conformity. Asking questions is good — but only if you are actually listening to the answer!
So, after rambling a lot here, again to the quote from PZ where I boldfaced some things… without the boldface, one could accuse PZ of endorsing blind conformity. But the whole point is that when someone is right, and you question their position, they usually have an answer…
I’m conflicted. If the kid was five years older and we read the story about him refusing chemotherapy, most of us would say “another nut hoping that woo will cure him because he doesn’t like the real cure,” shake our collective heads, and go on to something else. However, since Daniel Hauser is a 13 year old we feel he should be given chemo against his and his parents’ wishes. I don’t know if we should just let him go his own way. I don’t want a child to die needlessly but I don’t want to impose my version of reality on someone else.
This is not a simple problem and there’s no simple answer for it.
I still remember the day, 15 years ago when the doctor gave my sister the news regarding the tumor in her lymphatic node just under the chin. It was Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The thing was, the doctor was a little weak on the humane side and he declared it was lymphoma and gave no explanations.
I was an undergraduate biology student then (so I did understand some of the lingo the doctor used on the release form from hospital) and lucky enough to have an internet connection at home. I read the prognosis and searched the net and found that 90% of the patients are cured. That gave us all hope.
My sister lost her hair, gained some weight, went through horrible chemotherapy sessions but survived. When this was discovered, she was newly wed. She now has 2 kids.
Can’t the state declare the parents misfit and take the kid into its custody and then treat him? The right to freedom of religion is overridden with the boy’s right to live.
As I recall, there was a Babylon 5 episode with a plot very similar to this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Believers_(Babylon_5)
What a sad state of affairs for that poor young lad. The child should be taken from the parents and placed somewhere where he will be safe and kept healthy.
The Cult of Moloch is alive and well.
Thank heavens in the UK those parents have a duty to protect and promote the health and welfare of their child and if they don’t then the doctors are able to ask the courts to override the parents. The doctors don’t always win (particularly in life-extending treatments in fatal diseases where the child has demonstrated the ability to consent), but at least we can protect children against things like this and the ban on blood products from certain religions.
As a former child protection specialist (and still a part-time trainer in the field), things like this really make me angry!
You can not eat your cake and keep it too. Pick your choice. And, also, ask yourself before. Is your version of the reality the right one ? If yes, why do you hesitate to act like it were ? if no ?, why do you keep it ?
The link I provided @#180 to Orac’s blog on the Chad Jessop case was just one of many times Orac tried to get to the bottom of a story about a miraculous cure of cancer via the use of naturopathic medicines.
Why are we talking about Chad Jessop? It was brought up by luna @#155 that one of Daniel Hauser’s lawyers in the current case referred to having represented Jessop, and the Jessop case was being used as precedent for the “let’s go natural, and no chemo” route. Here’s a repeat of that info:
“Hamwi [lawyer] said the Hausers’ case is similar to a previous one that she represented.
She cited the case of 17 year-old Chad Jessop in Orange County, Calif., who is also a Nemenhah member.”
I’ll repeat the first link to Orac’s attempted debunk: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/11/why_would_i_promote_a_hoax.php
Here’s a quote from the scam Orac was trying to reveal:
“The family is in desperate need of support and legal assistance. The Natural Solutions Foundation is taking this threat to our collective Health Freedom and our Freedom of Speech very seriously. The Foundation will continue to assist and are building a network of natural physicians, Constitutional lawyers and other experts to be ready to act as “amicus curiae” – Friends of the Court – in similar cases. If you can help us fund or staff our Health Freedom Posse, please reply via email. Remember that your donations key to these battles!”
Uh-oh, red flags, big time. Orac had the same reaction and wrote:
“Finally, if the story is being used to raise money or push a political agenda, that is perhaps the biggest red flag of all. Consider such stories false until proven true. That’s what I do these days, especially in the blogosphere, and I haven’t been burned nearly as badly in a very long time.”
Orac notes that the fund-raising efforts combined selling allopathic methods and herbs with fund-raising to cover Chad Jessop and his mother’s legal costs. Here’s an excerpt from that bit, which Orac posts at http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/09/the_story_of_the_17yearold_with_melanoma.php:
The source of the e-mail seems to be the Natural Solutions Foundation/Health Freedom USA, given all the “donate” buttons in the webpage to which I tracked this story down with a little bit of Googling, a site called Democracy in Action. Here’s how the story starts:
Dear Health Freedom Fighters:
There is a developing story from California that involves a mother with a 17 year old child who HAD melanoma. The mother, chose to go against her allopathic (conventional) doctor’s orders (to have surgery and chemotherapy) – and instead try advanced natural medicine first – since she understood that supporting the body’s ability to heal is more effective than destroying it as chemotherapy does.
Not surprisingly this approach worked! This young man is now CANCER FREE!! However, the allopathic doctor is insisting that the child must have chemotheray as well as surgery, which the mother refuses to have her child undergo. Interestingly, doctor, the allopathic doctor’s unnecessary treatments will be compensated by the insurer or state, while the holistic strategies that actually worked are not eligible for coverage.
Here’s an excerpt from http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/11/an_update_on_cancer_boy.php
This is Orac quoting once again from the scammers:
“In honoring Chad’s wishes for continued holistic care, Laurie took her son to San Diego to continue holistic care using a number of various alternative treatments such as: ozone, hyperbaric oxygen chamber, hydrogen peroxide, energy work, Rife, nutritional supplements, and deep emotional work. Laurie also used “black salve” that she purchased from Canada to remove the mole tissue. Black salve was developed by Native American Indians more than 200 years ago, and used in the treatment of skin lesions, cancers, warts, and moles. Figures our FDA banned it, because it works.”
Thanks to Orac’s probing, the fact that surgery would have been a likely treatment for Chad’s melanoma (*if* the melanoma ever existed) was brought out. And thanks to Orac having raised several other questions about the whole scam, I suspect the lawyers (read “scammers and Nemenhah fake tribe members”) have learned a thing or two. This time they picked a cancer for which it would make more sense to refuse chemo because chemo would actually be the recommended treatment.
One other telling detail shows up in Orac’s blogs, one that I think Orac may have misread. The judge in the Chad Jessop case was called “Whore of the Beast” by the Jessops and their supporters. FLDS members “bleed the beast” whenever they can — that is, they perpetrate frauds that siphon money out of the representatives of “Satan” (Satan is everyone not in the FLDS cult — see Carolyn Jessop for more on the Satan bit — it’s very real to them.) Anyway, it’s considered legit to take welfare funds in order to support a polygamous lifestyle, and it’s also good to scam outsiders. I can’t make the FLDS connection firmly here, but the parties involved already connected themselves to the Chad Jessop affair, so that part is solid.
We can’t tell now if Daniel Hauser really has cancer or if this is just the beginning of another scam. If it is a scam, it may have a political motive, as well as religious and financial motives.
The water is muddier than before.
Don’t want to get into the Jessop story too much because so much garbage has been written about it by now that the truth is difficult to determine.
As far as I can tell, the original doc removed some moles and send them to pathology. They turned out to be malignant. This kid did not have stage four, which would be advanced metastatic melanoma. Maybe they are referring to grade. The procedure here would be to excise a wide margin around the moles, which were already removed, in case there were malignant cells that had already migrated out and could cause a reoccurrence. This is just a precaution on the side of safety because melanoma is refractory to chemo.
It is likely that the first surgery got all the neoplastic cells and all the rest of the woo stuff was just doing woo for the sake of doing woo. The claim that the mother cured her son is probably wrong, it was likely the first doc with his scalpel.
The rest of the story is all song and dance and exploitation and wild claims that can’t be substantiated. I will say that the original doc didn’t handle the situation too well on the patient-medical system interface. When you hit someone out of the blue with a scary diagnosis they can go into shock, denial, and panic. The doc met resistance and immediately called CPS and made some accusations and threats.
As to the FLDS scamming society, they will if they can. A study decades ago found that 80 or 90% of them in their city, Colorado City, on the Utah-Arizona line were on welfare. How else does a guy living in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of wives and hordes of kids support them without working? I don’t know if that is the case any more. The state of Utah wasn’t too pleased to be spending huge amounts of welfare money supporting a heretical religious cult.
wheatdogg @43 posted that “mormons reject this group” but reading the posts from “Feminist Mormon Housewives” given by luna @134 will show you that some mormons do buy it. (see http://www.feministmormonhousewives.org/?p=72, you’ll have to scroll down past the stories of women and children being abused.)
BTW, the link http://www.cloudpiler.com is currently working.
Here’s a post from the sceptics among the Feminist Mormon Housewives:
“Philip Cloudpiler is highly suspect….
http://www.lawlibrary.state.mt.us/dscgi/ds.py/Get/File-14154/00-436_Opinion.html
To sum up the above link, the state of Montana found him guilty of defrauding a group of unemployed loggers during a business scheme to start an organic mushroom growing operation.”
And here are some posts showing the pro-Cloudpiler camp:
“Thanks for the excellent comments on forgiveness. I am interested in the role of women in the LDS Church. Recently I read a fascinating document at http://www.cloudpiler.com that, among other things explains what the true role of women in the church should be. Look it up. It is really interesting. Kay Wilcox
Posted by Kay Wilcox, March 4, 2005″
“I have personally seen the recognition document from the Native American Church of Utah stating that Phillip “Cloudpiler” Landis is in fact a recognized Medicine Man/Spiritual Leader of the Native American Church of Utah.”
“I have read all the available archives!! I have read the book of mormon nearly 50 times… Who are we to question God and what he choses to reveal to us?? It is from this disbelief and murmurring that we have had witheld many truths… As cloudpiler states in the beginning of each book… and asks us to test the new information! And it is as often taught through out the archives by the various writers… “do not merely trust another mans/ womans word”…Go to God and ask Him!!… Do not cheat yourself the rights of a personal relationship with The Savior, The Holy Ghost, and Our Father and Mother in Heaven!!… They will teach the truths of all eternity!!… I have sat with and heard and felt the strong spirit of cloudpiler… I have experienced the ammonite ceremony with this great man and many other great people and felt the powers of heaven come down and sit with us… You should all feel priveledged that he even responded to some of your judgements… evaluate your own souls and come unto Christ! What is soo hard to grasp here?? Forget the quarrels and unite ourselves under a cause that once was cried out from many of our ancestors, the pioneers and original members of the LDS faith…. ZION… It has been lost!!…We, must bring it back!! And if embraced by the majority of the church, I am confident, we will see the condemnation placed upon this church lifted… ZION or call it the nemenhah way or call it loving equally all people… We must stand behind this cause “ZION” or stand out of its way!!! We are ALL free to choose our own destinies!!! I place my hand on my heart and lower my head to you cloudpiler for the sacrifice and attention you have given to this work amidst much opposition… I gladly call and embrace you as my brother! Marc December 27, 2006”
For more on Landis (Cloudpiler), see this link:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=mt&vol=00&invol=436
luna @#137 asked if people were really buying the “Book of Hagoth” crap-pile. The answer is some do, some don’t.
My take is that Mormon housewives (feminist or not) are desperate. They’re latching onto anything, including Cloudpiler as another Joseph Smith. Cloudpiler sees himself as another Joseph Smith and his advice not to read the Mentinah Archives is a con man’s trick.
Here’s how the faithful respond to the Mentinah Archives con:
“As far as the Mentinah Archives, he has probably told more people not to read them than he has encouraged to read them. Anyone who has been around him knows that. His Forward to the Mentinah Archives is very clear that he is not claiming them to be authentic or fiction, that knowledge must come from the witness of the Holy Ghost.”
Ex-mormon’s will recognize the appeal to the Holy Ghost as the arbiter of truth. You read, you pray, you get the burning in the bosom and you Know.
Cloudpiler just took Joseph Smith’s con a step further. Lot’s of women like Landis/Cloudpiler’s version of the con because it gives them more power within the church.
The mothers-as-healers with “natural” medicines at their disposal is part of Cloudpiler’s con. The con even refers back to Brigham Young’s wives being supposedly healers. “Restore women to their rightful place in the Mormon Church” and “fight Satan as he appears in the medical establishment” and “buy my medical crap which will be mailed to you straight from Mexico or Canada” sums it up.
Well now, this is interesting: If you go to http://www.cloudpiler.com you get what looks like an ordinary offering of software, financial and travel services, etc. But if you go to http://cloudpiler.com you get a menu that includes Nemenhah info, Lamanite info, the True Role of Women, and so forth. But, if you click on the religion-related links they lead to pages that no longer contain that info. Somebody is cleaning house!
Raven @#195: Orac pointed out that it became impossible to confirm the original doctor’s diagnosis for Chad Jessop, to find the lab reports, etc. The diagnosis may have been faked by the scammers. Hard to tell. We’ll never know.
We do know that the scammers wanted big-time attention, so they went to court. They said the mother was put in jail and refused counsel — all faked.
For all of you accusing jbt of trollery, I think you need to take a breath and reread “Godwin’s Law” and substitute ‘troll’ for ‘nazi’…
jbt is making reasonable arguments that demand a higher standard of answer than is being provided him, I think. The one comment he made in #149 that I was thinking was to the effect that ALL religions are amalgams and have some fraud of some sort… I don’t know why the people on this who are making comparisons about one religion being more fake than another… either you believe one religion is right and the others are wrong, or you believe all religions are wrong — in either case, there’s no comparator among the wrong religions.
That said, the fraud that Landis has been convicted of does need to be published, but like jbt said, it isn’t going to matter to the existing true-believers or those bent on believing.
I had this drag-out argument with my wife about this case — she is of the persuasion that the right of health care choices is like the extreme versions of free-speech defense the ACLU defends, even when the circumstances are grotesque. I had to agree with her at the end — as long as it doesn’t affect me (like them refusing treatment of some typhoid-like disease and wanting to come into public arenas), then I have no say. That is the price of these freedoms — that stupid and gullible people make mortally ignorant decisions. Even if they are 13 and are doing so because their will is bent by their parents.
My wife’s argument follows: If the gov’t can mandate between a 95% success rate treatment and a 5% one (the do-nothing option), what is to stop them from stepping in and mandating a patient’s choice between a 80% success-rate treatment and a 75% success-rate treatment? It’s an ugly, tragic case, but could be a slippery slope.
For all of you accusing jbt of trollery, I think you need to take a breath and reread “Godwin’s Law” and substitute ‘troll’ for ‘nazi’…
jbt is making reasonable arguments that demand a higher standard of answer than is being provided him, I think. The one comment he made in #149 that I was thinking was to the effect that ALL religions are amalgams and have some fraud of some sort… I don’t know why the people on this who are making comparisons about one religion being more fake than another… either you believe one religion is right and the others are wrong, or you believe all religions are wrong — in either case, there’s no comparator among the wrong religions.
That said, the fraud that Landis has been convicted of does need to be published, but like jbt said, it isn’t going to matter to the existing true-believers or those bent on believing.
I had this drag-out argument with my wife about this case — she is of the persuasion that the right of health care choices is like the extreme versions of free-speech defense the ACLU defends, even when the circumstances are grotesque. I had to agree with her at the end — as long as it doesn’t affect me (like them refusing treatment of some typhoid-like disease and wanting to come into public arenas), then I have no say. That is the price of these freedoms — that stupid and gullible people make mortally ignorant decisions. Even if they are 13 and are doing so because their will is bent by their parents.
My wife’s argument follows: If the gov’t can mandate between a 95% success rate treatment and a 5% one (the do-nothing option), what is to stop them from stepping in and mandating a patient’s choice between a 80% success-rate treatment and a 75% success-rate treatment? It’s an ugly, tragic case, but could be a slippery slope.
I don’t agree with you on this one. Your mistaken assumption is that standard medicine is guided exclusively by science. This has not historically been the case and is not the case now. Do we know how effective radiation or chemical “treatment” is? Doctors feel they have to do something and they tend to do what they know how to do regardess of whether it works or not. That is not science. People have the right to refuse medical treatment and it is not always irrational to do so.
Doing so for religious reasons is, of course, irrational by defintion.
One correction: In my post @#194 I said I thought Orac had “misread” the phrase “Whore of the Beast.” I didn’t say what I meant. No doubt, the supporters of Chad Jessop did call the judge a Whore of the Beast. What I meant to say was that Orac may not have recognized this as a reference to everyone outside the cult being “the Beast.” Everyone outside the cult either is Satan or represents that evil.
Several people have pointed out that it’s an oxymoron to say “fake religion.” Right. But if someone can call a con man on adding another layer to the fakeness, then they should do so…especially if it affects medical care for children.
The fake Mormon documents (“Book of Hagoth”) is actually kind of a kick to consider. One fake breeds another. Reminds of Joseph Smith’s problem when his compatriots started having revelations just like he did. He needed to find a way to put a lid on that. Only approved fakes, please.
Of course we do. Drugs need to be tested in 3 phase clinical trials, double blind, randomized, placebo controlled. Then apply for FDA approval where the data is beat to death by hard nosed and very smart professionals who are born skeptics. This whole process takes years, hundreds of millions of dollars, dozens of MDs and related professionals, and involves thousands or tens of thousands of patients. The data is published and available to anyone with a library card or internet connection. And a working brain.
Your point that medicine is still stuck in dark ages is just BS lies from someone profoundly ignorant and too lazy and deluded to spend 5 minutes with google or pubmed.
A fact that will just sail over your tiny head. The life span in the USA in a century has increased from 47 years to 77 years. Blame modern medicine for that 30 year increase in life expectancy.
All adults are free to refuse any and all medical care. Few do because they want that additional 30 years. Despite the lies and BS of the ignorant, the main problem with modern medicine isn’t people rejecting it. The main problem is that demand is far greater than money to pay for it or the availability of it.
The kiooks and crackpots are here. Just part of the human condition. Not going to waste time feeding trolls again.
Another correction: I had earlier posted “We can’t tell now if Daniel Hauser really has cancer or if this is just the beginning of another scam.” Very careless of me. We can’t tell if Chad Jessop ever had cancer, but there is ample evidence from the specialist who supervised Daniel Hauser’s first treatment that the kid does indeed have cancer.
no, it actually is. Slippery slope … fallacy
luna @#137: The link you posted (http://mentinah.com/) still leads to the Mentinah website, but now there is no information there! The quotes you posted yesterday are all we have to go by now? There should be a cache somewhere.
A lot of online leads to Cloudpiler’s nonsense are swiftly disappearing.
Another child killed by religion:
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/another-child-killed-by-religion/
Ah, here is another source for the Mentinah Archives (since Cloudpiler’s websites seem to be being scrubbed of all incriminatory evidence):
http://platesofmormon.wordpress.com/mentinah-archives/
The stuff is torture to read.
DocFabShoes was right on the money. I think JBT has a number of points, however, they are based on incomplete information.
Issue #1: Cancer cure rates vary wildly depending on the type of cancer and how advanced. Early stage lymphomas, over the past ten years, have gone from nearly uniformly fatal to nearly uniformly curable due to advances in cancer research.
Pancreatic, lung, and esophageal cancers have fairly dismal cure rates. Glioblastoma likewise.
Everything else is middle ground. A lot of people don’t get that these cancers are all different diseases, not just “Cancer.”
Issue #2: This kid may or may not be old enough to make his own decision, regardless of the amount of woo waved at him. This is most likely what the court is trying to decide. If this has gone to court, his parents have almost certainly been rejected as decision-makers. The child is probably undergoing psychiatric and psychologic evaluation to decide his maturity level, understanding of the options and the consequences of each.
If he is able to understand these consequences, it is likely he will be asked to make his own decision.
People are allowed to make stupid decisions. It hurts to see a child at risk, but if he has capacity, he can choose to be at risk.
We denizens of pharyngula may seem to have a knee-jerk rejection of religion, but I think what most of us are upset over is the idea that a child is being placed at risk in the name of superstition, when there is an excellent, though patently not fun, alternative.
raven:
Strangely, I was asking a legitimate question. Given the spontaneous remission rate for this type of cancer (higher than whatever qualifies as ‘normal’), whether the statistics might be a little skewed on that basis. But only because this type of cancer is what they sent me home to die of back in the ’50s. When they had precisely zero alternatives to offer, so it wasn’t a big deal. I still had spleen issues when I was in high school – had to have vitamin K shots whenever I got a cut or had teeth pulled (braces). ‘Cured’ that when I got married and was in charge of my own diet, big on dark leafy greens. Haven’t had a bleeding problem in all the years since. That’s just me, all I’ve got to compare since the only other person I’ve known with a Hodgkins cancer died of it (though he did persist for almost 5 years of medical hell before giving up and checking out).
By the way, that 5-year figure is how they measure ‘cure’ for this. A 5-year survival rate. As opposed to 2 or 3 with mere pallative care. Many apparently live much longer, which is wonderful – so did I even though I got no treatment. This appears to be a cancer that a good percentage of people are somehow able to overcome. With, but also occasionally without, the gnarly treatments.
My true hope is that someday researchers in the oncology ranks will get together with all their experiences (and stories told by others) of spontaneous remission. Follow up with those few who experience that nifty thing, see if they can’t use modern tools for expression profiling to close in on the precise profile that characterizes the phenomenon. Examine what trigger(s) may be involved, and the various genetic polymorphisms that affect efficacy. Learn how to turn it on. It’s not like researchers haven’t identified universal system remodeling expression suites that do weird things like heal hearts during their time on ventricular assist and such. Doctors don’t ‘heal’ people. They enable people’s systems to heal themselves.
THAT is why the brute force attempt at healing is “barbaric” in my estimation. I fully expect that as we know more, these sort of treatments will thankfully pass into historic footnotes for “the best we knew at the time.” I have great (but possibly misplaced) faith in science to get to that point someday. And I bless all those suffering humans who volunteer for testing treatments and training transplant surgeons with their own bodies when there is no other hope for life. I just don’t want it imposed on people either for profit or for experimentation (the only two sides to our current health care system) or even for “this is what comes next” against their will. Believe that suffering individuals have a right to die on their own time, thanks, even if they’re only 13 or 14 or 17. So long as they’re informed, understand their choices, and choose not to play the game.
If this boy is allowed by law to do just that, then I don’t feel like it’s my responsibility to strap him down and force it on him. The concerned parties – including the state and a judge and witnesses on all sides – are involved, will make a decision I am not authorized to make. I expect I’ll be able to live with whatever decision is made, whether or not the boy does. Nothing here to start a shooting war over.
That opinion upsets you, obviously. Which only makes me wonder why you’re such a slave to PZ Myers that you’d obediently freak out whenever he tells you to, without applying a modicum of critical reality-based thinking to whatever issue it is he wants you to freak out about. Weird.
Re: #186 James Sweet May 10
James, great post! … I agree with your observations about the internet. Unless one already has a lot of knowledge how does one tell the woo from the good stuff? Most people here probably can because they have the right background, but the majority of the general public probably don’t. How to protect people from woo on the net? Needs doin.
Lynna @ 202,
It is more like a pleonasm, I would say.
But it is a tricky question. How to tell the difference between a fake religion and a real one? It is not the case that a real religion is closer to the truth or more plausible. Nonsense is nonsense. Perhaps the sole hallmark of a fake religion is the fact that the con man or mentally deranged person who started it is still alive (corollary: all religions are invented by con men or mentally deranged persons).
One might object that this implies that a fake religion can become a true religion as soon as its founder dies. But that is exactly my point. The implication works both ways: every true religion started out as a fake religion.
Who knows, maybe in a thousand years from now the world is dominated by the Nemenhah religion (and people are living in caves again).
Drosera @21: Heh. Yes, pleonasm. Better.
The Nemenhan con is clever in the way that it takes advantage of laws meant to protect Native American culture and tradition. Slime and cleverness combined.
I also love the way Cloudpiler “translated” a bunch of crap that no one has ever seen. Hey, if it worked once, why not again. His followers even use the jail time to his advantage. Joseph Smith was also put in jail, so hey, that’s proof right there.
i would say a nice test to tell “real” from “fake” religions is how they answer this question:
was the faith intentionally created as a money-making scheme?
i’m not saying “real” religions are any better at describing the ultimate truths of reality, but i see a big difference between age old native traditions that attempt to answer “how did we get here?” “does life have purpose?” etc. and are not about financial gain and stuff like the “nemenhah” which was crafted deliberately to take advantage of law that protects “native healing” as a religious preference by a white dude who wants to be outside the reach of the law when the bottle of “defense” herbs he sold you doesn’t actually cure cancer.
a “real” religion is not one whose views on the universe are scientifically correct, it is one were those views are genuinely held for reasons of faith by the founder of the faith.
Cloudpiler? Shitpiler, if you ask me.
God must be having a great time watching those silly human beings that he created for his entertainment. I imagine that sometimes when He is bored (it must after all be boring to be both omniscient and omnipotent) He actually listens to what some preacher proclaims about Him. I am sure that He just can’t stop laughing. Such a pity that He doesn’t exist.
you are big into projecting, aren’t you ?
What about alternative hypothesis. some people applied critical reality based thinking to your idea of letting 13 y old heavily indoctrinated teenagers die ‘because they want it’ and found it lacking. And people like that tend to hang around blogs of like minded people. So the causality is exactly opposite. We don’t agree with PZ because we read his blog, but we read his blog because we agree with PZ more times than we don’t.
luna1580,
If you would replace “money-making scheme” by “a scheme to get the better over other people, especially those of other tribes” you would perhaps be closer to the truth. I don’t see noble intentions in the origins of any of the great religions. Their founders were not seeking answers to great questions, they were just trying to establish the supremacy of their tribe.
@T_U_T:
I’m not following your comment… What do you mean, “no, it actually is?” Second, what fills in the ‘…’ between ‘Slippery slope’ and ‘fallacy’? I gave my scenario for where it seemed to possibly be slippery, what’s the counter-evidence for “no, this is where the bright line is?”
Why the hell aren’t these people being prosecuted ?
>> “Could someone explain how this treatment is against their religion.”
It is in the unexpurgated version of Exodus;
11. Thou shalt not use monoclonal antibodies.
12. Thou shalt not use antibiotics.
13. Thou shalt not use Neuraminidase inhibitors.
Of course no one understood them at the time, and there is much debate over the translation from the ancient hebrew.
Sorry – couldn’t resist – but I think some nutters assume that god will heal their illnesses so doing something about it is against his will. As Ben says “bat shit insane”.
There’s local news coverage dated today at:
http://www.nujournal.com/page/content.detail/id/506850.html
Here’s an excerpt:
“Attorney Calvin Johnson, representing Hauser’s parents, argued the court must take into account the right to establish a foundation for the case. He said the state legislature has recognized naturopathy, an alternative medicine system that focuses on natural remedies and the body’s ability to heal itself, and that one of the witnesses has been practicing a cancer care system that is also recognized.”
Amazingly, the news coverage still refers to the Nemenhah Native American Tribe, accepting it at face value. No questions asked.
@jbt:
By the way, that 5-year figure is how they measure ‘cure’ for this. A 5-year survival rate. As opposed to 2 or 3 with mere pallative care
*sigh*
you’re still confused about this. Yes, survival rates are measured against variable periods (not just 5 year, btw).
what you seem to be really missing is the variability of survival rate dependent on treatment and the type of cancer.
I can’t understand why you keep trying to lump everything together, but it appears to be confusing you, so stop it already.
the way you SHOULD have written the above is:
“By the way, that 5-year figure is how they measure ‘cure’ for this, [as measured by 95% survival rate within that period] . A 5-year survival rate. As opposed to 2 or 3 with mere pallative care, [that result in fatality 95% of the time over the same 5 year period].
If you had understood the issue correctly, you would see that what we are talking about here is a 95% chance you will NOT BE DEAD from cancer after 5 years with treatment, vs a 95% chance YOU WILL BE DEAD after 5 years without.
that’s a BIG FUCKING DIFFERENCE.
get it now?
By the way, that 5-year figure is how they measure ‘cure’ for this. A 5-year survival rate.
Not exactly. A five year disease free survival implies cure in most but not all cancers. It used to be that cancer was generally found late and killed quickly. Under those circumstances, one could reasonably approximate five year disease free survival with five year survival: no one with active disease lived five years. Now, thanks to better treatment including better palliative and second line treatments, more people are living with cancer for five or more years. For example, a person who had HL who has been disease free for five years is cured of that disease. That doesn’t mean that they’ll never have another cancer or even die of another cancer, but that one’s gone. A person who has recurrent disease at 3 years but is alive (with or without disease) at 5 years may or may not be cured eventually. It isn’t possible to say yet.
@gordonsowner
On noes! The slippery slope! Everyone in Massachusetts has been marrying their dogs and anything with a hole in it since gay marriage was legalized. We definitely should give more credence to the slippery slope. The fundies did warn us after all.
Yeah, I’m sure the Mansonites all hold faithfully to the reasons of faith of Charles Manson.
Krystalline Apostate-
your point?
i challenge you to find anywhere that i claimed any existing religion actually passes my “real” test. i only pointed out a way that one could be more “real” in my estimation.
i also didn’t claim that passing my “realness” test would make the belief morally acceptable to nonbelievers, merely that it would be a genuine belief, not a conscious scam or fraud.
was mason scamming his followers in his zest to start a race war? was he sincere, just evil? was he simply crazy? can we really know?
also, i was discussing the motivations that lead to the creation of religions, not the motivations of those who are drawn to following them.
Damn it, I just can’t keep track of all these threads. I wonder if there is some notification tool for new posts… anyway, browsing through this thread it appeared to me that blaming the parents or the child might be the wrong approach. After all, these are deluded people, deluded by a (from our, and most people’s, point of view) dangerous religious doctrine. There is nothing inherent in faith to keep you from extending that faith to the most horrid, genocidal, torturous beliefs, just as rational information does not per se alleviate a schizophrenic patient’s hallucinations.
IMHO, the reason, and the measure, for being “moderate” or “extreme” never lies within faith itself, but in external social values. These terms refer to a particular culture’s values, where a “moderate” religion conforms well to these, while a “extreme” form of religion does not.
To get to my point, it might not be wise to demand rational action of these poor child’s parents, or discuss their irrationality (because it isn’t irrational, in their minds). This is, to my eyes, clearly the case where tolerance (for the parents’ views) is inappropriate. Psychologically, and legally, children at the age of 13 cannot be held fully responsible for their actions, and thus are supposed to be “guarded” according to the values of the society they happen to live in; meaning, harmful – as defined by the broader public consensus of what is harmful – actions are to be refrained from.
It should be noted that this is more something of a spontaneous thought or association, not a well thought-out opinion on freedom and tolerance. I am aware of some of the problematic implications (what if the public opinion is deluded as well?), yet will be happy if being pointed to further issues.
That’s Manslaughter is the kid die’s
The United States and Somalia are the only countries in the world that have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
If you believe this statement, I pity you, because you are divorced from reality.
If it’s just a line you spout in order to feel you have the moral high ground, you are one sick fuck.
When the poor kid dies, two things will happen:
1. They will sue the county for not forcing them to do the chemo.
2. They will claim it just god’s mysterious ways and now Daniel is in “a better place.”
It will never be data that challenges their nutty metaphysics. It’s always, “god’s mysterious ways,” which we just know are actually more good and moral, we’re just incapable of delving he deep, mysterious ways of goodness and light.
In the religous mind, evil is good and good is evil. 1984, baby. And they like it.
You didn’t. Open-ended, no parameters.
Maybe you’re not catching on here. Religion’s a fraud, so why validate the ‘realness’.
Who? James Mason? Oh, right, Manson. Yep, all of the above. We really know. He was CRAZY, all caps. (Psst, learn how to capitalize!)
That’s odd, it sounded like you were playing apologist.
Make that three things.
They will claim that he will be resurrected and come back to life. Some fundies claim this happens often and can cite cases. Of course, there is never any documentation but for believers, there is no such thing as a lie that can’t be believed.
In this particular case it would help to validate the relative un-realness of both the Native American tribe being claimed, and of the hybrid of fake Mormon with fake Indian tribe “religion.” Neither is as claimed, so neither should have any standing in court.
Gorogh @228: There is a “Recent Comments” list in the left column. You can kinda, sorta track active threads there.
Ha, ‘fake Mormon,’ that’s a fake of a fake of a fake. This would all be endlessly funny if it would not cause the death of real kids. I fear that the parents are probably too stupid to recognize the fraud even if that faux Indian Cloudpiler told them so in person.
Drosera @#237: Yeah, I was getting a kick out of the layers of fake myself. Cloudpiler is apparently good at telling people he’s a felon, but still keeping them in his thrall. Like I said up-thread, he’s a regular Joseph Smith.
Still, I am appalled that the court and the news media do not seem to be picking up on the layers of fraud and exposing them. At least give people a chance to make their decisions based on a deeper pool of information.
@Lynna (#236), thank you :)
Since I posted my “complaint”, I also discovered the RSS-Feature; I might try that, too.
Lynna, you are right, the media should expose this. So why aren’t they doing it? Probably because even a ‘fake’ religion commands respect from the average American journalist. And where will it end when journalists start to question a religion? In a country where even a Mormon can become a presidential candidate this may not be a wise thing to do for a newspaper.
Religious people are like mobsters, in that they tend to get very upset if they perceive a lack of respect. They are also like mobsters in that they don’t deserve it.
Dave @ 76:
“How many of us would have a BIG problem if one of these religious types called child services whenever our children did not attend church? (I’m guessing it’s nearly 100%) So how do some of you feel justified in saying that someone should call child protective services? Don’t these parents have just as much right to make these decisions as you do?”
You’re seriously comparing not taking a child to church to letting him *die*? A completely avoidable death? The parents’ religious freedom rights end where their decision is *harming their child*. Not them, but their child, who has not yet had the opportunity to make an adult, rational decision whether to share and live by those beliefs or not.
As for jbt’s concern, I do not disagree that a 13-year-old *may* be capable of making a rational decision on their own to refuse treatment, and that such refusal *may* be the rational thing to do, such that we should allow a 13-year-old input into medical decision-making and should be careful in forcing treatment on a teenager who says they don’t want it. On the other hand, there is a reason why we don’t generally allow children free rein to make decisions about medical care for themselves. In this particular case, even if it is the child himself saying he doesn’t want it, given the fact that almost all kids treated for this disease apparently survive it, I think it is clear that his decision cannot be based on anything rational but on fear and parental brainwashing. I strongly suspect that as an adult he would be very grateful to the state for stepping in and saving his life.
Drosera @#240: Good point about the mobsters. :-) Hadn’t thought of it that way before.
On a related note, here in the Netherlands today a trial started against a medium called Yomanda. She stands accused of causing the death of a local TV star, Sylvia Millecam, in 2001. Mrs. Millecam apparantly consulted Yomanda about a lump in her breast, whereupon the medium, who has no medical training, declared that it wasn’t cancer but just a bacterial infection, and advised strongly against seeking proper cancer treatment. Mrs. Millecam was unwise enough (not to use a stronger term) to follow this advise, even when her condition deteriorated. After Mrs. Millecam died of cancer, the medium challenged the cause of death, blaming it instead on a silicon breast implant.
This has all been widely publicized, and still people flock into their hundreds to the big ‘healing’ sessions that this medium organizes regularly. Perhaps they should ask Yomanda to cure them from their stupidity first. But then she would be killing the goose with the golden eggs, wouldn’t she?
But what if it’s the Colonel’s Secret Recipe? That’s SEVEN herbs, AND spices.
Try and top that, science!
Good point about Yomanda — don’t cure gullibility or you lose the followers.
Which makes me wonder about the apple and the tree of knowledge and all that. Could it be that we have been tricked? All this time that apple was actually the Apple of Gullibility! Look where eating it has gotten us.
I’ll take shitty analogies for 1000 Alex.
Pete Rooke is that you?
Krystalline Apostate-
stop being an ass. if you’d read any of my other comments (beginning at #89) you’d grasp that i raised the concept of “fake” religion because it is undeniably relevant to this kid’s case.
it’s one thing for us to decry a needless death brought on by any religious belief, be it an “honor killing,” or refusing your diabetic kid insulin, or this kid refusing chemo, and we all do decry and deplore it.
but this case is in a way even worse, because as research yesterday by myself and Lynna revealed, the “native religion” this family believes in was purposefully concocted by a white naturopath who is already a double felon for fraud (one of his scams was getting a group of unemployed loggers to sink all their savings into raising “cancer-curing” reishi mushrooms and then abandoning them when it wasn’t really a million-dollar cancer-cure after all.). this man deliberately framed this “faith” in such a way that the Federal Native American Free Exercise of Religion Act of 1993 (NAFERA) would protect his naturopathic line of supplements “native american nutritionals” from further fraud persecutions by giving him exemption from american medical standards as a “native practitioner.”
i really doubt that this 13 year old kid (who thinks he is now a “medicine man” himself) knows that the “native american religion” he wants to die for is the fake-native, fake-mormon creation of a white guy who needed a legal dodge for the next time his “medical” advice didn’t cure cancer!
i don’t care about debating if all religion is a form of “scam” because it isn’t based on the empirical truths of our world in this particular thread. i was acknowledging that whether that is true or not, this kid’s “nemenhah” faith is a deliberate and calculated money-motivated fraud hiding behind a native rights act -something the judge and the family ought to be made aware of!
really, did you just skim the comments looking for something that could be construed as “pro-religion” to pounce on? or are you just too stupid to grasp that this case can be proven to be a fraud created by a man still alive and freely spreading this crap around, so it is different in a legal sense than say the great “fraud” of christianity in general?
and i don’t have to capitalize here for you, i capitalize in business and academic writing, not blog comments. i choose the “poetic license” of not using conventional capitalization here, just as you did when spelling “crystalline” with a “K.”
Lynna, there is indeed something strange about this Tree of Knowledge story. Adam and Eve are said to have eaten its fruit. So, how is it possible that the people in the Bible, who supposedly descended directly from this primordial couple, are all without exception still woefully ignorant about everything? Apparently all they were good at was looting, raping, committing incest, and genocide. These people have left nothing of interest to posterity, except their poisonous unholy book that caused the death of untold millions of people. Couldn’t Adam and Eve have done some home schooling?
i have received replies from my email to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
They are expecting to publish a story on the Nemenhah and Landis tomorrow. of course, the court ruling on Daniel Hauser is also due tomorrow. let’s hope that the truth about this “religion” is about to be revealed and reach the Hauser family’s ears.
So, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, if you go for all these fairy tales, that “evil” woman convinced the man to eat the apple, but the apple came from the Tree of Knowledge. And the punishment that was then handed down, the woman gets to bleed and the guy’s got to go to work, is the result of a man desiring, because his woman suggested that it would be a good idea, that he get all the knowledge that was supposedly the property and domain of God. So, that right away sets up Christianity as an anti-intellectual religion. You never want to be that smart. If you’re a woman, it’s going to be running down your leg, and if you’re a guy, you’re going to be in the salt mines for the rest of your life. So, just be a dumb fuck and you’ll all go to heaven. That’s the subtext of Christianity. – FZ
It is conceivable that Eve just picked the wrong apple, one that related to the construction of an anti-gravity device (a handy tool when you want to create a universe, but not very useful when you are walking stark-naked in the Garden of Eden). She should have started with the one containing the laws of motion.
luna @247: great post. The distinction between religion and fake religion, real tribes and fake tribes *can* be made here, even if Religion-as-fraud is more of a moot point in general.
luna @249: Thank goodness! So glad to hear that at least one newspaper is going to follow up. From the bits of testimony given by the mother in the Daniel Hauser case, I doubt that anything will sway her. An x-ray with indisputable results was simply waved away by her as wrong. There’s hope for the boy though. It’s a “maybe” but you tried.
Rev @250 and Drosera @248: The first time I ever heard Christopher Hitchens speak, he was being interviewed on some cable news show and he said that the Adam and Eve story was the most pernicious fable ever devised by man. Yep, it’s done lots of harm. Harm to women. Fosters anti-intellectualism. I could go on, but I have to go pick some fruit.
Saw a cartoon in a recent New Yorker that postulated a Tree of Dance, and other variations. Can’t remember for sure all the iterations in the cartoon, but for sure you could just have different apples on the same tree. Eve was the first victim of false advertising.
luna @249: too bad that some of the sites on which we found incriminating info have now gone dark. Cloudpiler or Nemenhah lawyers were busy scrubbing their internet presence even as we were investigating.
I’m still not done with the “Native American Church of Utah” and Landis.
luna1580,
Could somebody point them to this blog? The truth will be a bitter pill for them to swallow, worse then any chemotherapy.
worse than
Here’s another member of the fake nemenhah tribe, this guy’s in Florida. Since they sold adoption into the tribe for the right “donation” or “offering” it’s no wonder that scam artists all over are taking advantage of it:
http://www.cassadaga.biz/
i did refer the reporter to follow the links in these comments here (in addition to the information i’d already sent him), with a disclaimer to please disregard the personal sniping that fills the comment sections of all blogs and just look for our collected info/leads on landis. getting this story into their main local-city paper -and hopefully the wider press- on the day of the court ruling (which will be covered for sure) is probably the best chance we have of the hauser family learning what there is to learn, if they’ll believe any of it is another story.
he wrote me back that he’s been pursuing this angle all weekend and just needs to make final confirmation that landis/cloudpiler of the nemenhah is indeed the same person as landis of the multiple fraud convictions.
it is a shame that so much was probably wiped online, the reporter also said the relevant phone numbers have been disconnected (you know, things the innocent often do). i wish him all the best in finding proof he can publish, as i so want this story to come out into the wider press.
Lynna, that guy in FL looks a trip! nemenhah, christian, and a spiritualist -i guess that frees him up to sell you “native herbs” that your dead grandma has prescribed from heaven on jesus’s personal recommendation! that’ll surely heal whatever ails you…
This link is still working, and it presents at the top of the page (with bad html formatting problems, but readable) excerpts from what used to be Cloudpiler’s website:
http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=1898.0;wap2
Scroll down to see comments on Landis as fraud.
Other links on that newagefraud site lead to some of the Landis sites that have gone dark. For example: http://www.thenativehealer.com/ Native American Traditional Org. (www.thenativehealer.com) This site is temporarily unavailable. Please notify the System Administrator Joomla!
luna @258: Regarding the guy in Florida, yeah it pays to leave no arena of fraud untouched. He covers it all.
I know that if you add the “cache” operator to a google search, as in cache:www.thenativehealer.com, then google will take you to a snapshot of the cache of the page. However, even the snapshot of thenativehealer.com is just the notice from Joomla! that it’s unavailable.
Adding the cache operator to a google search like this:
cache:www.cloudpiler.com takes you to a snapshot of the old (April 25th, I think) page that included links to Nemenhah stuff. The links no longer lead to the actual Nemenhah documents that Landis wrote, but one can at least see from the April snapshot that cloudpiler.com used to provide nemenhah, as well as other, blather.
Orac is blogging now about Daniel Hauser:
See http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/05/another_child_sacrificing_himself_on_the.php
Links to Nemenhah info from Orac’s blog work. Here’s an “about” page for Landis:
http://blog.nemenhah.org/?page_id=2
Here’s some more legal tap dancing from “Chief Cloudpiler” and there’s lots more where this came from, see: http://blog.nemenhah.org/
[Cloudpiler text begins here] …The Constitution was always what is considered a “Self-Determinative” document, in that we declared our own existence. But the reason for that had nothing really to do with the UN Declaration per se…. The Constitution was Self-Determinative because that’s one of the ways one forms a new church in the State of Utah, our state of origin.
That’s right. In Utah, a church is either formed by Incorporation or by Declaration! When a church forms by incorporation, its members are essentially begging the State to “contractually” allow the existence of the new entity and give permission for it to operate within the commerce system already in place. We didn’t feel inclined to follow in the worn out footprints of the Corporate Model and wanted to emerge out of the popular methods that we felt were part of the problem with the world. So, we opted to form the Band by Declaration instead. This method has not been used for well over a hundred years but remains to this day just as valid and effective as it was when the State Constitution was written. Now, as things come around, it appears that we were speaking and acting in just the manner that the UN has identified as the hallmark of Indigenous Peoples and Groups.
As a Native American Traditional Organization and Church, duly recognized by other “Tribes, Bands, and/or Traditional Organization,” to quote the Law of the Land, we obtained a level of safety net which is unparalleled in the Natural Healing world. Because our Natural Healing constitutes part of our Bone Fide Native American Religious Ceremony, it cannot be regulated without the regulating agency exposing itself to the onus of “Extinguishment.” That ugly term is really only found in International Law and it is synonymous with “Cultural Genocide,” “Ethnicide” and “Ethnic Cleansing.” Frankly, I would find it surprising indeed if any City, County, State or Federal Agency wants to open that sort of Pandora’s Box. International Law does not dictate Domestic Law, but it does “inform” it, and that is why the High Court has decided in our favor. Because of our status as Nemenhah Medicine People, we can get on with the work of relieving suffering. [end Cloudpiler excerpt]
As far as I can tell, Landis/Cloudpiler is “associated with the Oklevueha Native American Church of Sanpete” which has real Native Americans as members, this way he legally satifies the clause that says he must be recognized by other Tribes, Bands, and traditional organizations. Pretty thin legal cover.
Once again, the State of Utah has to take some blame here, they made the laws that allowed Landis to just declare himself a church.
Why the law may be forced to recognize the Nemenhah as Native Americans, unless somebody unravels this mess and removes the thin cover of legality (info from subpages at the nemenhah.org website:
Just as aside, the Mooney guy mentioned above had a dispute with Utah law enforcement over his peyote stash. Cloudpiler notes that Nemenhah Medicine Men or Women who want to take part in peyote ceremonies can be shunted over to Mooney.
Okay, I finally figured out how to blockquote, but now I can’t figure out why the rest of the blockquote doesn’t look right.
That’s a bug, not a feature.
So if I understand your last posts correctly, any group of American citizens can call itself a native tribe – and as a result obtain some kind of legal protection – as long as there is some other native tribe that is willing to back that up. Well, that is just a matter of making certain donations to certain folks, isn’t it?
Hmm. Maybe I could still emigrate to the US to realise my childhood dream and become a real Indian galloping across the prairies on his white horse. Should be fun. Now where did I put my tomahawk?
Yeah, I always thought I should declare myself a Native American for the fishing rights in Alaska, to set up my own casino, and for the good times to be had at Native rodeos. Just cultural envy, really.
I think that what Cloudpiler did was to take advantage of a series of loopholes. In Utah one can declare a church. He teamed up with some real Native Americans to declare a church (or to modify a church the Natives already had going — I’m not clear on that). For that part he went back to Utah laws over a hundred years old that had never been removed from the books.
He took advantage of a loophole the U.S. Government opened when they created the Rosebud Native American Church in the earlier 1900s as a catch-all for some disparate Native Americans. The Rosebud NAC had the power to create their own outlying congregations, so several were created, including one in Sanpete, Utah.
Cloudpiler claims to be a descendent of Native Americans, but if you read the Native American history and blogs, you’ll find they all dispute this. (For one thing, he seems to be declaring he’s related to Chief Joseph who had only one surviving child, and the line died out — and sometimes he declares to be related to someone else, but that’s hard for a non-native or non-historian to figure out because a single individual can go by many names.) Nevertheless, Cloudpiler convinced Mooney (real Native American) of peyote-use fame to certify him as President and CEO of the Sanpete branch of the original Rosebud NAC. The certification is for life. This is probably where the money you mentioned above comes in. Cloudpiler says he was “invited” but he probably worked pretty hard to get in. Mooney and tribe may have really needed the funds and the organizational expertise.
Next Cloudpiler declared his “Nemenhah Band” to be synonymous with Mooney’s band by virtue of Mooney having accepted and recognized him.
So, he’s not a “tribe” which has special legal ramifications, but he is a “Band” and he cannot be prosecuted for any of his religious practices nor any of his pseudo medicines. He is protected by the laws that protect Native Americans.
Cloudpiler/Landis is an efficient organizer and bullshitter. He took a little bit of real stuff and parlayed it into a business. He separated the corporation that sells the naturopathic medicines from the church…on paper. But, he still gets to advertise the corporate side as having the Native American magic touch.
He has a big organization now, with official “Stone Carriers” in most states, and lots of Medicine Men and Medicine Women associated with the church.
It’s pretty roundabout, and pretty thin, but it’s working. He has even gotten around what few restrictions there are on homeopathic/naturopathic/alleopathic medicines. I would say he learned a lot from the mushroom-growing fiasco and his brushes with the law.
If you move to Sanpete you can participate in peyote ceremonies and then you won’t have to ride the white horse, you can fly. I don’t mean to make gratuitous fun of real Native American ceremonies, just of Landis et. al.’s co-opting them.
I’m not sure about the tomahawk. I don’t know if that is required or not.
There are quite a few wild horses in Utah. Maybe you could capture one of them, which would surely earn you extra points. I suggest looking along Muddy Creek in the San Rafael Swell — over-population of wild horses last time I was there.
Oh, yeah, you need to do one more thing: write an extension of the Book of Mormon, playing off the already questionable “history” of tribes from Israel who came to the Americas…well, you get the picture. Whatever you do, be sure to suck the women in. Landis took care to give special attention to “The Older Woman” and “The Role of Women” and so forth.
One more loophole to add to those above: There’s a court decision Landis/Cloudpiler uses to justify the fact that members of the Nemenhah band of little or no Native American blood. The text below is an excerpt from the “due diligence” link on http://nemenhah.org:
The quote makes me wonder about James Mooney’s tribal enrollment, and there’s also the revelation that they copped 800 acres of land from the federal government.
There’s a twist to this story, and Orac explains it nicely in a new addition to his blog. Far up-thread on this blog, someone also noted that the Hauser family might be using the Nemenhah religion as a legal ploy.
Orac wrote:
You’ll have to read Orac’s long post to get the full gist of the story and of his conclusion. He begins by summarizing the Cloudpiler connection to a past case. See the update at:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/05/daniel_hauser_and_the_rejection_of_chemo.php#more
If Orac is correct, this more or less removes Cloudpiler and the Nemenhah lawyer from the Hauser case.
For my money, Cloudpiler and the entire pseudo-religion, pseudo Native American, pseudo-alternative medicine (I know, I know “pseudo alternative medicine”!) house of cards should be exposed.
here is the column about landis-cloudpiler in the star-tribune. i wish he’d exposed the weird faux-mormon link, but it’s a start:
http://www.startribune.com/local/44755337.html?elr=KArks:DCiUHc3E7_V_nDaycUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUU
Lynna @268,
Is it legal to use peyote in the USA? That seems strange when law enforcers there react hysterically to the faintest trace of marihuana. It is like prohibiting air guns but allowing machine guns.
If you can show it is for a religious ceremony and you are part of said religion, yes. (AFAIK)
Drosera-
peyote is highly illegal in the U.S. -with the exception of it’s use in the official native american church. i believe to be recognized an an official member of this church (as opposed to, say, an official nemenhah member) you need to present a tribal affiliation card, the same thing that will get you treatment with native health care, the indian health services ( http://www.ihs.gov/ ).
there are different requirements for each tribe (real tribe, not “band” alone) but most are blood quotient, proof of line of descent, or proof of legal family adoption in some combination.
Rev. BDC,
Yes, I see that this is also stated in the article linked to at #272.
Interesting. Another example of the religious getting preferential treatment. Maybe heroin addicts should start their own religion. I do hope it is still illegal to sacrifice virgins in the name of religion.
Thanks luna1580.
I liked this comment to the article in the Star Tribune:
This must be just about the most stupid remark that I have ever read.
Rev and luna are right about the peyote. However, Drosera, I will add that you can just pay, excuse me, you can “donate” or make an “offering,” to the Nemenhah Band/Church and they will in turn send you to peyote training with their affiliated Native Americans. So, you’re all set there.
Also, Drosersa, when you get ready to make your move, do make it to Utah. Their lax laws pertaining to multi-level-marketing will definitely give you a leg up. They’re friendly to the point of criminality to woo medicine of all kinds. Perfect storm of scam opportunities.
Thanks for the advice Lynna, but no thanks :)
On reconsideration, I think the comment I quoted at #276 must be that of a Poe. Surely?
if you’ve read all these comments you know all this, but here’s another nice blog summary of the nemenhah/faux-mormon situation:
http://www.computernewbie.info/wheatdogg/2009/05/11/a-sad-curious-tale-of-rampant-duplicity-and-stupidity/
The Mpls Star and Tribune article is quite good. I especially liked “Call it death by multilevel marketing.”
Although the Star and Trib article didn’t get into the off-the-wall Mormon connection, the commenters did:
One of the funnier posts on a site where Native Americans were discussing Cloudpiler referred to his first try at creating a native band. Apparently he chose a name already associated with a legit Nez Perce band and the Nez Perce performed “the ceremonial waving of the lawyers” and Cloudpiler had to backtrack and take a different road.
The journalist at the Star and Trib took exactly the tack that occurred to me earlier, and that is to connect the Hauser family to some legit Native Americans and let them talk the family into getting proper medical care.
Apologies to the Minneapolis Star Tribune for presenting their name incorrectly above.
Amusing rant in the comment section related to the link luna provided @279. Yes, peyote-man himself, Mr. Mooney, is incensed. Seems the big difference is between a church and a Native American Band that also calls itself a church?
@squidBrandon:
Not everything people say is a slippery slope actually is. That doesn’t mean that slippery slopes don’t exist. Gay marriage was falsely claimed, imho, to be one. However, the law does address them. Here’s a paper on the general topic from Berkely Law, easily found on ‘teh google’:
http://www.law.berkeley.edu/journals/clr/library/lode01.html
That’s one educated way to approach the arguments. The moronic way is to post a ‘oh noes’-type response. Well done, squidBrandon. Now I suppose I’ll be accused of being a tool of the religious right, even though I come here for the atheism (though, sadly, there’s still veins of stupidity and irrationality in the commenters here, sometimes).
Heads up to any Pharyngulites in the Louisville, KY, area: “Chief” Cloudpiler will speak at the Galt House this Friday on “Legal Issues for all Practitioners of the Healing Arts.”
The odds are good he will mention joining the Nemenhah Band for a suggested donation of $xxx.
Details here: http://www.electronicmed.com/Brochure%20US%20Conference%20May%202009.doc
Local woo-meister Peter Moscow is the organizer of the weekend conference at which Cloudpiler (née Landis) will speak. Moscow, another certifiable wackjob, will also speak on, “How to Evaluate the Elemental Imbalances Drawn from the Full Periodic Table” on Saturday. Catch this detail from the brochure:
Yes, neon is chemically active in the human body! Bet you didn’t know that.
Moscow is therefore eminently qualified to challenge Cloudpiler’s medical assertions.
Thanks for keeping us apprised, wheatdogg. I don’t think you’ll get the attention of Pharyngulites unless you post this within a more recent thread.
I WENT ON-LINE FOR A HEADACHE AND BOUGHT SOME TYLENOL. GUESS WHAT? IT WORKED!!! THAT LADY IS STUPID!
Perhaps Talmud says it best: one may live by God’s law, but one may not die by God’s law. This is the extremism the Counter-Reformation tried to end. I wonder how extant this group’s theology actually is. Makes me proud to be a Catholic!
Almightly Allah will cause the Crusaders to suffer for the errs of they ways! Only the Q’uran offer the One Truth! Infidels will burn at the gates of Hell. Islam is Moderate Religious and would listen to Mayo doctor. If he is a Believer. And not Jew. Or woman. This make Islam the only way!