Live from the Nuke Free Zone

Via the Houston Chronicle comes a story that seems to have been little remarked upon outside of Texas: a young girl by the name of Katie Wernecke has had radiation therapy for her leukemia repeatedly delayed due to the idiotic pseudoscientific paranoia of her parents. By latest report, she had an 80-90 percent chance of recovery when the whol sordid mess began, which has now dropped to 20-25 percent. In addition to the alternative-medicine quackery angle, the story contains questions on government intervention.

The basics of the story are simple. In January, Katie was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, considered quite curable. Chemotherapy destroyed the tumor and radiation treatment would seek to prevent recurrence. Katie’s parents balked, claiming that radiation therapy induced side effects like sterility and stunted growth (it doesn’t, “Survivors of Hodgkin’s disease typically progress through puberty normally,” Papadakis V, Vlachopapadopoulou E, Van Syckle K, Gonadal function in young patients successfully treated for Hodgkin disease. Med Pediatr Oncol 1999;32:366-72), and proposed instead that she receive intravenous vitamin C, a popular quack medical treatment for diseases ranging from cancer to the common cold.

Fearing for Katie’s life, her doctors informed Texas’ Child Protective Services, which removed Katie from her parents and placed her in a foster home, from whence she was taken to Houston’s world-renowned M.D. Anderson cancer center to receive radiation therapy. Regrettably, Katie refused treatment: kids will, of course, reflect their parents’ views on such matters. Between this and court cases over control of her treatment, doctors were unable to treat Katie, although Katie is currently reported to have changed her mind and begun accepting treatment. At this point, M.D. Anderson doctors put her chances of survival much lower than they would have been had treatment been administered promptly. Had it been, Katie’s ordeal would most likely be over by now with Katie leading a perfectly normal life.

People wonder why academes get so exercised when someone tries to insert Intelligent Design in high school classrooms, or why The Amazing Randi is willing to put up a million-dollar prize for anyone evincing paranormal powers. This is why. When people stop respecting truth — objective, measurable data and the logical conclusions that flow therefrom — and substitute wishful thinking, people die.

We in the First World live in a relatively safe society, fairly nonviolent and generally clean, with access to modern medicine. Oh, we may grumble about the details left over; how to deal with crime, lower industrial pollution, and expand access to medicine equably. But compared to 100 years ago or the modern Third World, we’re in fantastic shape, with our diseases mostly the diseases of excess comfort. And we’re here because people don’t consider public vigilantism a societal duty any more, because people know we should wash up to kill germs, and because people aren’t allowed to sell snake oil on the street corners any more.

Except in the last case they’re still trying to, despite every limitation the law can put on peddlers of homeopathy and chelation and vitamin megadoses. and every time the quacks get a customer someone else’s life is at risk in a way that didn’t have to be the case. Katie’s parents’ rights to raise their daughter and choose her medical treatment didn’t end when they abandoned rational thought, but by Pete the government’s responsibility to protect her life immediately trumped them when they did.