Re: Makayla Sault, who refused chemotherapy for leukaemia in favour of alternative treatments, has died, Jan. 19.
The wholly unnecessary death of pre-teen Makayla Sault is infuriating.
Her disease was curable in most children. Not controllable, not manageable; it was curable. Yes, the required chemotherapy can be difficult, but to save a life, a few months of discomfort are a very small price to pay.
Without therapy, acute leukemias are uniformly fatal. With all due respect to native traditional medicine, they don’t work for leukemia (or cancer, HIV, diabetes, etc). Resorting to these traditional or alternative “therapies” is simply ridiculous. It represents an incapacity to weigh risks and benefits, and is magical thinking at its most destructive.
I am ashamed that our society let a child die because we were afraid to confront what I believe were misinformed, frightened parents. They may feel that their child is with God now, but this child should have had 60 or 70 more years of life instead of dying at the age of 11; dying, because her parents were likely weak and uninformed, possibly misled, and our institutions could not find the backbone to protect this child from the grossly misguided efforts of parents who should have moved heaven and Earth to save her life.
Steve Kravcik, MD, Ottawa
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