Hodgkin’s lymphoma is a relatively curable disease:
The survival rate is generally 90% or higher when the disease is detected during early stages, making it one of the more curable forms of cancer…
Most patients who are able to be successfully treated (and thus enter remission) generally go on and live long and normal lives, due to a remission success rate of 90% to 95%.
Of course, if your mother is a religious nut who refuses to let you have that treatment, that success rate would go down considerably, to under 5%. Ditto if she’s brainwashed you to think you shouldn’t want that treatment.
The mother of 13-year-old Daniel Hauser testified Friday that she and her son would refuse to comply with any court order requiring the boy to resume chemotherapy for his cancer.
“Danny clearly made up his mind. He’s not doing it,” Colleen Hauser, of Sleepy Eye, Minn., testified on the opening day of a trial over whether a court should order the boy into medical treatment against the family’s wishes.
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.
There’s a much lengthier report on this case here.
Daniel, the teen, says that he is a “medicine man” and church elder in the American Indian religious organization Nemenhah. His parents are members though they are not American Indians.
Although both Daniel and his mother are refusing his treatment, the blame should rest squarely on the mother. She’s the one who is old enough to know better.
What sort of mother are you if there is a way to rescue your dying son and you refuse it? If he does die, what will she be thinking then? Whatever it is, I hope she’s thinking it while rotting in prison. She’s not fit to be a parent.
11-year-old Kara Neumann died because of religious parents who couldn’t look past their delusions to save their daughter. There’s no reason Daniel Hauser should suffer the same way.
