Christie Blatchford: Decision to let girl treat cancer with native medicine is humane but puts her future in doubt

 

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Video showing 11 year old Makayla Sault reading her letter explaining why she has asked her parents to take her off chemotherapy and pursue traditional medicines instead.

It’s the rare story where almost everyone — almost — has acquitted themselves with honour, but such is the case of Makayla Sault.

She’s the 11-year-old from the New Credit First Nation in southern Ontario who is stricken with an unusual form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL, the most common childhood cancer, and who has been in the news of late as she and her family fought to stop her chemotherapy treatments in favour of traditional native medicine.

She and her parents won that battle this week when the local children’s aid society, Brant Family and Children’s Services, closed its investigation, ending the threat of a possible apprehension and allowing Makayla and her parents, Ken and Sonya, to proceed as they wish.

As Andy Koster, the agency’s executive director, puts it, his decision wasn’t a medical one, but a humane one.

 

Makayla’s family is loving and close, he said; she had been through the mill already with the first round of aggressive chemotherapy, and the little girl herself is bright and had begun work on a formal declaration of her wishes.

“What are we going to do — take her away from her loving family?” Mr. Koster wondered aloud in a telephone interview Wednesday. “We have to bring her into care so we can force chemotherapy on her?”

He said he recognized “I wasn’t going to be able to base this decision on whether traditional medicine works. I don’t know the relative merits of it.” Rather, he said, he based it on Makayla’s emotional and spiritual needs.

It was a kind decision, rare in a world where children’s aid societies have been less than quick to respect the cultural values and traditions of other groups, such as the Mexican Mennonites (where in 2002 Child and Family Services of St. Thomas and Elgin County seized seven of the most ridiculously hale youngsters you ever saw from fundamentalist Christian parents whose church advocated physical discipline) or, more recently, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Lev Tahor sect (where last year the Chatham-Kent Children’s Services launched a court battle to seize custody of 14 children and return them to Quebec, where they had been originally ordered into foster care amid allegations of abuse and, well, cultish behaviour).

 

 

Members of the Lev Tahor ultra-orthodox Jewish community drew the ire of Quebec Children's Aid in early 2014.

The Brant agency had been called in by doctors at McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton. The doctors, like all professionals who work with children, have the hard-and-fast legal obligation to alert child-welfare authorities when a child is at risk.

The doctors at McMaster did their job — a different job — equally well.

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is a big success story in the cancer world.

In 1962, the long-term survival rate was about 5%; now, over all, between 85% and 90% of these patients make it.

But Makayla has an unusual form of ALL called “Philadelphia chromosome-positive” which is present in only between 3% and 5% of children with the disease and which has been one of the stubborn subsets, with grim prognoses.

But in 2009, a team of researchers led by Canadian Dr. Kirk Schultz at British Columbia’s Children’s Hospital added a little something to the normal protocol of chemotherapy — one of the new, smart, bullet-type drugs called imatinib.

With intensive dosing of that, as well as intensive chemotherapy, the team more than doubled what’s called in clinical trials “event free survival” – meaning, no recurrence or spread of the disease — for children and teenagers with Philadelphia chromosome-positive ALL.

Virtually no research on any of the traditional native medicine practices, whatever they may be, has ever been done

And just earlier this year, after a longer-term follow-up to that study using the same double-whammy of regular chemo and imatinib, the team reported in the Leukemia journal that happy outcomes for those with Makayla’s type of ALL jumped from about 25% to 70%.

In other words, her doctors at McMaster had good reason to believe she has a real shot at beating this thing — and that stopping the treatment, after only one round, would put her at risk.

Enter traditional native medicine, the efficacy of which is entirely unknown. The little girl’s family has said she will be treated via “Ongwehowe Onongwatri: yo:”, delivered by a traditional healer from Six Nations, a reserve near her own. Details of the treatment are considered “protected knowledge,” passed down only orally, and virtually no research on any of the practices, whatever they may be, has ever been done, and no scientific literature exists.

In the week or so between the time the hospital called children’s aid, and the Brant agency’s decision to close the file, there was much talk about the family’s and the first nation’s need to protect their rights and about culturally appropriate treatments. A “Makayla defence force” even sprang up, lest authorities attempt to intervene and remove her from her family. One native official suggested that staff at McMaster should receive cultural competency training.

No one would wish anything but a full recovery for this little girl, and the institutions involved — the hospital, the children’s aid — and her parents have all acted in what they believe is her best interests.

But if any of the parties need training in cultural competency, it would be the traditional healers whose culture isn’t in doubt, but whose competency very much is.

Postmedia News
cblatchford@postmedia.com

 

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Commentary by the Ottawa Mens Centre

As usual, a political decision trumps a child right to even live. This decision most probably is a death sentence for the child and there were other ways of dealing diplomatically but preserving the course of medical treatment.

Ontario has some 48 members of the Criminal Cartel called the Children's Aid Societies of Ontario.

They habitually fabricate evidence and are commonly referred to as The Gestapo
They hire psychopaths and the most anti-social, the ones who are pathological liars rise to become supervisors.

The lawyers who actually don't quit because of the criminal nature required of their work, get to be automatically appointed judges.

Even judges who were not former CAS lawyers are generally too cowardly to make a decision against what ever CAS want.

It's a sad day to watch well respected lawyers who became judges sell their soul to the devil by making corrupt decisions that are guaranteed to abuse children.

Justice Robert L. Maranger formerly a lawyer from Sudbury is one such judge. He recently became yet another cowardly example of a Dead Beat Judge who gave his blessing to Criminal Offenses by

Det. Peter Van Der Zander - Fabricated Evidence, Obstructed Justice and a notoriously well known as "a rotten cop" from one end of town to the other.

Phil Hiltz-Laforge. This effeminate cowardly Child Abuser, likes fabricating evidence against the most vulnerable in the community.

Claudette Knuckle-Dougan -a former womens shelter employee who fabricates evidence to advocate for the most violent of female child abusers and perpetrators of unprovoked violence towards Children and partners.

Robert GOD-Man "supervisors" these criminals and engages in terrorizing and abusing parents and children via antagonistic Abusive CAS "workers" who are specialists at absolute cruelty.

Higher up the chain you have evidence Fabricating Lawyers like "The Baby-Snatcher" CAS Lawyer Marguerite Isobel Lewis who judges in Ottawa simply rubber stamp anything and everything she wants even when its blatant child abuse.

If this child was not native, the child would have been apprehended and her future life preserved.

As usual, we see the Gestapo using billions of dollars to fail to protect children while abusing them.

It's enough to make you want to puke.

For every child in care in Ontario, you can generally thank a dead beat judge who is little more than a politically correct gutless cowardly "Rubber Stamp".

Ottawa is infested with them.

OttawaMensCentre

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Andy Koster, the agency’s executive director, made a political decision that had nothing to do with the child's best interests.


As usual, a political decision trumps a child right to even live. This decision most probably is a death sentence for the child and there were other ways of dealing diplomatically but preserving the course of medical treatment.


Ontario has some 48 members of the Criminal Cartel called the Children's Aid Societies of Ontario.


They habitually fabricate evidence and are commonly referred to as The Gestapo

They hire psychopaths and the most anti-social, the ones who are pathological liars rise to become supervisors.


The lawyers who actually don't quit because of the criminal nature required of their work, get to be automatically appointed judges.


Even judges who were not former CAS lawyers are generally too cowardly to make a decision against what ever CAS want.


It's a sad day to watch well respected lawyers who became judges sell their soul to the devil by making corrupt decisions that are guaranteed to abuse children.


Justice Robert L. Maranger formerly a lawyer from Sudbury is one such judge. He recently became yet another cowardly example of a Dead Beat Judge who gave his blessing to Criminal Offenses by

Det. Peter Van Der Zander - Fabricated Evidence, Obstructed Justice and a notoriously well known as "a rotten cop" from one end of town to the other.


Phil Hiltz-Laforge. This effeminate cowardly Child Abuser, likes fabricating evidence against the most vulnerable in the community.


Claudette Knuckle-Dougan -a former womens shelter employee who fabricates evidence to advocate for the most violent of female child abusers and perpetrators of unprovoked violence towards Children and partners.