When faith and medicine collide

December 27, 2006

By Conlon Tue Dec 26, 8:07 PM ET

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Any nurse can walk into a bad situation. The one Luanne Linnard-Palmer can't forget came as she readied a little boy for a blood transfusion only to be told by his mother "You know you're damning his soul to hell!"

The child's mother was a Jehovah's Witness, a faith that rejects blood transfusions. Her son had sickle cell anemia and had become extremely weak.

"It blew me away," Linnard-Palmer recalls years later. "I worried not only about my own reaction but what was going to happen to this child with a lifelong disease."

The incident planted the seeds for a newly published book by the California nurse, "When Parents Say No: Religious and Cultural Influences on Pediatric Healthcare Treatment," published by Sigma Theta Tau International.

In the case that was seminal to the book, doctors went to court and got a four-hour guardianship of the child so they could carry out the transfusion against his mother's will.

The boy went home after the transfusion and the nurse who had been so affected by the case has no idea what happened to him after that.

"American families move, change jobs. There are no longitudinal studies looking at this, at what happens the next time they receive medical care," she said in an interview.

The challenges she recounts are both religious and cultural.

A 14-year-old Muslim girl with severe burns on her arm from a cooking oil spill was recovering after surgery until her parents heard the surgeon talk about a graft made with pig skin. They demanded it be removed and the girl was ultimately left with almost no function in her lower arm.

A preteen girl with a large and rapidly growing neck tumor was recommended for immediate chemotherapy but her family said they needed three to five days to pray with their Christian congregation beforehand. After officials threatened to take guardianship of the child, she was brought back for treatment after just one day.

"But the family had been willing to risk, not maybe death, but the need for immediate treatment in order to fulfill their duties spiritually," Linnard-Palmer said.

"Just recently we had an Hispanic mother who said through interpreters that in her background men were the decision makers. Her young son is a very brittle diabetic cared for by an uncle who loads him up with sugar after school," she said.

"So now he's very ill. But she said she couldn't go against the men in her house. If they're going to give him sodas and cookies they're going to do this," she added.

LAYING-ON OF HANDS

Linnard-Palmer, a pediatric nurse at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco and a professor of nursing at Dominican University of California in San , believes that more time, training and money are being spent these days on helping medical personnel deal with religious and cultural issues when it comes to caring for children.

Large urban hospitals, which tend to have more resources, have been out in front. Her hospital has an hour-long conference every two weeks to discuss such problems, she said, and when an incident occurs there is intervention by psychologists and chaplains as well as medical personnel.

While the Jehovah's Witnesses are often mentioned, Linnard-Palmer says she has found increasing complications involving fundamental Christians.

"Over and over I see people who say they won't consent until they speak to a minister or have a laying-on of hands," she added, causing delays in treatment but not necessarily refusals. Gaining temporary guardianship through the courts is a well-established precedent, she said, though it does not happen all that often. It can have different results -- with some parents relieved that the matter has been taken out of their hands despite their wishes but others who are left in rage. The extent of the problem in the United States has not been well documented. One often-quoted study published in the journal "Pediatrics" in 1998 found 141 deaths of children in the United States over a 20-year period who were denied medical treatment for religious reasons but whose survival rate with treatment would have exceeded 90 percent. That study estimated that there were many more deaths which could not be documented. Rita Swan, one of the authors of that study, told Reuters she believes the problem today is not as bad as it was in the United States 20 years ago. But she said the problem is still very difficult to measure since some religious groups are not forthcoming and deaths due to treatment delays are not always recorded with that as the cause. "While we don't hear of as many deaths in faith-healing sects as we used to, opposition to vaccines, for example, is increasing and outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease are increasing, some tied to religious exemptions and some not," she added. Her group -- Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty (http://www.childrenshealthcare.org ) -- tracks a wide range of cultural and religious problems affecting children.

http://news./s/nm/20061227/hl_nm/usa_religion_medicine_dc_1

December 27, 2006

Here's my take on this:

Free people are truly free to make their own choices which includes making the

wrong choice and having to live with it. To take that fundamental right away

from someone is the most insidious and sneaky way to usurp everyone's rights

down the road. Parents all over the country are experiencing nightmare

encounters with doctors and CPS because of this very thinking. It is not the

medical personnel's job at all to interfere with religion or parental rights

even if there are good antidotal stories that make you think otherwise.

Child welfare and foster care run by the states in the USA has a much higher

rate of abuse then if the kids were left at home and yet it was to protect the

children that they are removed. It's not black and white and every situation has

to be thoroughly examined to find the best way to work it out but promoting that

the state or any medical model has the right to usurp family rights will end up

reducing everyone's rights in the end.

Freedom is a very precious thing. To limit freedoms for whatever reason sets a

precedent that can lead to less freedom for all. Being free means being

responsible for your actions too, making a poor choice has consequences but

that's part of the deal you get to be free. A few parents out there might make

the wrong choices from somebody else's observation but to set into place a

government or medical system that can casually usurp parents rights or undermine

religious freedom is an even worse solution.

If I was that Muslim girl I would probably rather not have pig flesh on my arm

but if full informed consent was given, which it was not or the parents would

never have allowed the pig flesh in the first place, then there might have been

a hypothetical alternative that would have worked earlier on where now the girl

does not have the use of her arm for good.

This Luanne Linnard-Palmer means well but she does not see the bigger picture

and free people do not need busybodies helping them " for their own good " . Look

at the human rights violations within the mental health industry from the

beginning of time.

Jim

December 27, 2006