[DanaC]

Tough call for all concerned.

I do feel for the mother in this case, and indeed the father. Treatment options for cancer and other life threatening illnesses are often complex and the odds of surviving versus the odds of complications can be a difficult thing to balance.

I don't have a great deal of faith in doctors to be honest, having lost several family members to medical malpractice or negligence (an aunt who was told by her GP that the persistent pain she kept visiting her about was a symptom of depression - six months later dead of cancer; an uncle whose surgery was delayed on the grounds that there was 'no bleed' in the brain, when in fact their scans had shown the exact opposite - dead in 5 days; another uncle whose operation was messed up when a piece of medical equipment was left inside, and then on the second operation an accidental cut to the spleen, followed by several blood transfusions because they didn't realise he was internally bleeding to death, and a grandparent who effectively starved to death in hospital). But - I don't mistrust them any more than any other professional.

Doing some research, getting a second or third opinion and not assuming that your doctor knows everything isn't a bad thing necessarily. Sometimes there is disagreement over the best way to treat something. Treatments shown to be effective elsewhere sometimes take time to become available in our system, and sometimes treatments and practices simply become accepted as the done thing and are therefore not questioned as much as they should be.

But: her reasoning fell apart utterly when she made the decision that homeopathic/natural remedies were somehow a better option. For anything, let alone for cancer.


This from wiki sums up why:

Homeopathic remedies have been the subject of numerous clinical trials. Taken together, these trials showed at best no effect beyond placebo, at worst that homeopathy could be actively harmful.[21] Although some trials produced positive results,[22][23] systematic reviews revealed that this was because of chance, flawed research methods, and reporting bias.[12][24][25][26] The proposed mechanisms for homeopathy are precluded by the laws of physics from having any effect.[27] Patients who choose to use homeopathy rather than evidence-based medicine risk missing timely diagnosis and effective treatment of serious conditions such as cancer.[28][29] The regulation and prevalence of homeopathy vary greatly from country to country.[

If you start googling this stuff in relation to cancer treatment, you enter a world of anti-science paranoia and pro-alternative medicine propaganda.