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Cancer Medicine Politics Popular culture Quackery

Noah McAdams: Another story of “parental rights” to choose quackery versus the rights of a child with cancer

Noah McAdams is a three year old boy with lymphblastic leukemia. His parents want to treat him with cannabis. The court says otherwise, but not strongly enough.

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Cassandra Callender’s cancer is progressing, and the quackery didn’t stop it. Let’s hope real medicine can.

Cassandra Callender made national news a couple of years ago when at age 17 she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and refused chemotherapy. The court ordered that she undergo appropriate treatment, but unfortunately she relapsed and chose treatment at a quack clinic in Mexico. Continuing to progress, she finally chose real medicine to treat her cancer. Let’s hope that it’s not too late to save her.

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Cassandra Callender, the teen who refused chemotherapy, has relapsed

I hate these stories, because they so seldom end well. Unfortunately, this one is more messy than even the usual messiness of the typical story of this type. The type of story I’m referring to, of course, is one that I’ve told from time to time ever since near the first year of this blog’s […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine History Medicine Politics Quackery Religion Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Makayla Sault’s mother: Racism, trust, and science-based medicine

One of the recurring topics I write about is, of course, cancer quackery. It goes right back to the very beginning of this blog, to my very earliest posts more than 11 years ago. Over the years I’ve covered more cases than I can remember of patients relying on quackery instead of real medicine. In […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Popular culture Quackery Religion Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Sarah Hershberger: “Cancer-free” and proof that natural healing works? Not so much…

One of the more depressing topics that I regularly write about includes of analyses of news stories of children with cancer whose parents decided to stop science-based treatment (usually the chemotherapy) and use quackery instead. There are, of course, variations on this theme, but these stories take form that generally resembles this outline: A child […]