Courts will decide if 7yr old boy receives life saving cancer treatment after mother denies over fea

The full story in The Telegraph here

Fears that life saving cancer treatment would leave son disabled......

Not sure if this as been done, so apologies if it as....haven't seen it....but my search doesn't work on here for some reason??

I just wondered what peoples views are on this?....my daughter is in remission after two and half years of cancer treatment after being diagnosed at the age of 7 so it evokes some personal feelings for me.

It as been described by the judge as " the stuff of every parents nightmare" .... and it is. But I would be interested to know who people think ultimately should make these decisions?

reply to post by Logos23


children have an incredable way of healing and adapting

so you have to get him the treatment.. if hes alive he hs a chance to heal

if he dies hes just frikin dead

reply to post by goou111

I think the problem is the mother doesn't see it as a life and death situation. She hasn't refused chemotherapy but as refused radiotherapy.Without the radiotherapy and just chemotherapy alone he has a 67% chance of survival....with it it's as much as 80%.
She as juggled the figures and decided she would rather give him the lesser percentage rate of survival with also less side effects.......
But I'm not sure she has the full knowledge to make that decision.I have seen plenty of kids do well on radiotherapy....and I have also seen plenty of kids on less aggressive treatment using only chemotherapy suffer side effects that she mentions that she associates with radiotherapy only.

I think it's a sad situation for everybody involved....I can't imagine a family having to deal with a court hearing on top of everything else

reply to post by Logos23


I have to agree with Sally on this one. The need for invasive therapy at this point should be out of the question. She claim's that her child is vibrant and healthy at this point in time.Why try to fix what is not broken?
It's anyone's guess how long he will stay this way...Umm, maybe into old age? Who know's?

Her Docter said, and I quote,
"The paediatrician, referred only as "Dr A", admitted that not all patients are "cured" but that most enjoyed a fruitful life and even going to university despite the risks to their IQ."

(A fruitful life?
I wonder if HE, or one of his children, were Leon, would his view's be the same)

The only question I have at this point in time, is what Leon want's. He might only be 7, but children should never be held out of the equation.

Radiation causes cancer at some point or other. But its really hard to not go with the higher chance of survival. And also, to then deal with healing his immune system, researching and using every single booster and natural thing you can that detox's heavy metal and have strong faith. Its very heart breaking situation.

I had asked my radiation doc how that worked. I said, "If radiation causes cancer, how can it help cure it?" He said it's all in the dosage, how much you get.

My cancer is gone after both chemo and radiation treatments. I can only hope that it won't return. You hear about people who live 20 and 30 years after having cancer, yet for others it keeps returning. cancer is different for everyone.

Originally posted by samgordon
reply to post by Logos23

 

I have to agree with Sally on this one. The need for invasive therapy at this point should be out of the question. She claim's that her child is vibrant and healthy at this point in time.Why try to fix what is not broken?
It's anyone's guess how long he will stay this way...Umm, maybe into old age? Who know's?

Her Docter said, and I quote,
"The paediatrician, referred only as "Dr A", admitted that not all patients are "cured" but that most enjoyed a fruitful life and even going to university despite the risks to their IQ."

(A fruitful life?
I wonder if HE, or one of his children, were Leon, would his view's be the same)

The only question I have at this point in time, is what Leon want's. He might only be 7, but children should never be held out of the equation.

Either way there IS a need for invasive intervention.The doctors have said if she does nothing he will die.The mother as already said she wont deny the chemotherapy as without it despite how vibrant he is right now the cancer WILL come back.The issue the mother has is that she doesnt want him to have the radio therapy element of the treatment which gives him a greater elevated chance of survival than with the chemotherapy alone.
My daughter didn't have radio therapy she just had chemotherapy.As a result of this chemotherapy she is now living with long term side affects including affects on her cognitive development. The mother seems to associate the long term side effects she fears with radio therapy alone and not chemotherapy which is the thing that bothers me.
I would never judge this woman as I appreciate the situation she is going through and I have no doubt she loves her child and just wants what's best for him...It's one screwed up situation :-(

Originally posted by Night Star
I had asked my radiation doc how that worked. I said, "If radiation causes cancer, how can it help cure it?" He said it's all in the dosage, how much you get.

My cancer is gone after both chemo and radiation treatments. I can only hope that it won't return. You hear about people who live 20 and 30 years after having cancer, yet for others it keeps returning. cancer is different for everyone.

When i was in the hospital with my daughter i saw a couple of teenagers and older children who had had the same treatment as my daughter when they were younger coming back with secondary cancers caused by the initial cancer treatment.It was hard for me to get my head around.....but i figured all I could do was give her the best fighting chance right now
I'm glad to hear you are doing well, it made me smile.I really mean that, they are not just hollow words.My best wishes to you... and may you never have to look back and be able to put this behind you for ever! (((hugs)))

reply to post by Logos23


Thank you so much. I wish you and your daughter all the best. The words cancer, chemo and radiation are scary enough, but it has saved so many lives and often out of fear, people will refuse trdaitionl medicine altogether.

reply to post by Night Star


Radiation comes in 3 forms, alpha, beta and gamma.

Alpha (a) radiation is very short range (~10cm in air) and is extremely ionising. It is very harmful to whatever it touches, fortunately, it can do very little damage due to its short range and the fact that it's absorbed very easily. If you held an a source in your hand, it would burn your skin but do little else. If you swallowed an a source, you'd be in a bad situation.

Beta (b) radiation is short range (~1m in air) and is moderately ionising. It is quite harmful to whatever it touches, it is arguably the most dangerous type due to its penetration, range and ionisation factor, but in reality depending on the situation, a or y radiation will be more harmful. It can be fully absorbed by a thin sheet of aluminium or similar.

Gamma (y) radiation has a near infinite range in air and is very hard to stop. It requires very thick lead and concrete to absorb it. Its extreme penetration power is due to the fact that it is unlikely to ionise whatever it is passing through at the time, compared to other types of radiation.

Basically, if you were in a room full of radiation, you'd want it to be a, while y would be the most dangerous. If you swallowed some radioactive rocks, you'd want them to be y, while a would be the most dangerous.

The radiation used in the treatment of cancer is y, because the aim is to provide a controlled dose of radiation at a specific place within your body. Unfortunately, due to the nature of radiation we can't ensure that the entire dose is absorbed at the tumour site, so we use low-ionising gamma rays (technically x rays, but the semantics of that change weekly, the physics community is so pedantic).

Before I go on, I have to explain cell replication. Your body has trillions of tiny bubbles of stuff called cells, with each cell performing a specific function, you have muscle cells, nerve cells, skin cells and so on. Some cells in your body are quite short lived, so they need to make copies of themselves to maintain the functions of your body before they die (not all cells do this, notably your brain cells). To do this, they undergo a process called mitosis, the end result of which is 2 cells instead of 1.

During mitosis, everything in a cell is duplicated so the daughter cell is a perfect clone of the cell before, however, the DNA duplication process is a risky business. DNA is stored during normal operations as a kind of twisted ladder, like this -
|A-T|
|A-T|
|C-G|
|T-A|
where A can only pair with T and C can only pair with G, but you can have either base on either side of the ladder. During mitosis, the DNA is broken down the middle so it looks like this -
|A T|
|A T|
|C G|
|T A|
there 2 separate strands are surrounded by single bases floating around that look like this
|A |A |C |A |T |G and so on
these floating bases then join to their complementary pairs in order to form 2 separate but complete strands of DNA so this
|A-T|
|A-T|
|C-G|
|T-A|
turns in to this
|A-T| |A-T|
|A-T| |A-T|
|C-G| |C-G|
|T-A| |T-A|
This process can go wrong however, resulting in mutation - it's the reason people today all look different and we're not all single celled organisms!

Mutation in humans is a slow process, our cells divide quite slowly and our DNA is so well protected that mutation is rare, and when it does happen it's often inconsequential due to the way our body processes DNA.

If you add ionising radiation in to the mix, DNA mutation becomes a much more frequent occurrence during mitosis, which will most likely result in cell death.

The use of radiation to treat cancer works on a very simple concept - tumour cells replicate faster than normal cells, therefore they will be more damaged by a certain dose of radiation than the rest of our body's cells will be. The idea is that we kill a lot of them and only a few of us, and if we keep doing that, eventually they will have nothing left.

This obviously doesn't always work out as planned, there is a lot of random chance involved. If we just happen to destroy the tumour suppressing gene in one of our healthy cells, or even damage the DNA in such a way that one more mutation will destroy it, we've created another cancer which can be more dangerous than the first, the way DNA codons work is that they're redundant, TAG can be the same as TAC and TAT and so on, but even if we change a codon to code for something else instead of what it's supposed to, it might not have any effect, if TAG, TAC and TAT code for a certain amino acid and CAG codes for another, changing the codon to CAG might make us produce the second acid instead, but that might not mean anything.

I've gone on and on and I'm at the limit, I'll happily explain everything in more detail if anyone's interested, but I don't like to do more than 1 post.

Courts rule that 7 year old Neon must undergo radiotherapy as part of his treatment despite his mother's wishes.

Mother set to appeal ruling.

Mother will hold everyone involved accountable if Neon suffers any adverse side effects.

(Sorry for using the Mail, it seems to have everything covered on this one though.)

The judge hoped, however, that Mrs Roberts would accept the judgment because ‘he [Neon] needs both his parents to support him’.

But that is unlikely to happen. After the ruling, Mrs Roberts told the Mail her legal team has made an application to appeal against the decision and said she will sue if Neon does suffer side-effects as a result of the treatment.

In an emotional interview, she said: ‘I will be holding them all accountable — everyone who has been involved in his treatment. The judge, the doctors, my former husband — the lot of them. I will definitely hold Ben (Neon’s father) responsible. He felt the fear of the doctors.

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