Wis[s]e Words

A heavy blow against quackery

Sylvia Millecam was a popular Dutch actress and comedian who died of breast cancer seven years ago. She need not have died if she hadn't refused proper medical treatment; it was detected in an early enough stage to be treatable and quite likely treatable without mastectomy. Unfortunately she instead put her trust in alternative/paranormal healers, who convinced her she didn't have cancer at all, that it was just an "advanced bacterial infection". So she went in for acupuncture and other quackery and after her death it emerged one of her primary caretakers had solely used paracetamol to treat her! It was only when it became clear she was dying that she went into hospital, where all they could do was alleviate her suffering: the cancer was too widespread by then to repsond to treatment.

As you can imagine, this high profile case caused a lot of controversy when the circumstances surrounding her death became clear, with some people calling for prosecution of the "healers" Millecam had put her trust in as murderers or associates to murder. Indeed, the justice department did investigate whether or not crimes had been committed and did go after several of the people involved. But what remained unresolved was the question whether or not it was a crime for people without medical credentials to givea wrong diagnosis to a patient in their care. Giving a diagnosis is not a protected medical practise and doesn't fall under the remit of the medical authorities, so they were powerless to deal with Millecam's caregivers, even though a medical doctor deliberately misdiagnosing a patient would be prosecuted through those authorities. At the same time, the justice department reached the conclusion that they couldn't prosecute either, as Millecam wasn't forced into her decisions, but had voluntarily decided to refuse treatment and trust her therapist's diagnosis.

Two Dutch anti-quackery organisations, de Vereniging tegen Kwakzalverij and stichting Skepsis, disagreed with this and together with a retired medical inspector filed a lawsuit to force the justice ministry to prosecute. This week the courts agreed. The argument the court gave for this decision is that any person, accredited or not, who presents themselves as healers, therapists or alternative doctors and such do have a duty of care towards their patients. This means that they have the obligation to make sure their diagnosis is correct, that the patient knows the limitations, risks and efficiency of their therapy, that they do not provide incomplete or erroneous information about the patient's health to her and finally that they have the obligation to send their patients on to a proper doctor when needed, especially in life threatening situations. The court further jugded tha the healer in question, New Age guru Jomanda seems to have spectacularly failed in these duties and hence should be prosecuted for this failure. The argument that because Millecam voluntarily put herself under Jomanda's care, the latter does not have these duties was rejected.

This decision of the court, which cannot be overruled, suddenly means that the cozy situation new age healers and other charlatans were in, able to dole out medical advice but not responsible for the consequences if their advice or treatment was wrong, has now ended. From now on they can be prosecuted if they made errors in judgement or deliberately mislead patients, just like medical workers always were. For a country that is as addicted to feelgood new age quackery as the Netherlands that can only be good news. Millecam's case was the perfect example of why these sort of beliefs are not only wrong but harmful, because faced with the difficult and painful prospect of having cancer and the burden of treatment needed to combat this cancer she was encouraged to reject this prospect for one in which she could painlessly be cured from a "bacterial infection". She was offered the chance to escape into a dream and stupidly but understandably she choose this escape. You can't fault her much for that, but you can fault the people she trusted for facilitating her fantasy.

It's precisely this fantasy of a painfree, easy way of dealing with your illnesses that makes alternative medicine so seductive. It's also a big clue that it's all horseshit. Medical treatments of cancer are horrible and dangerous because cancer is such a difficult and nasty disease. To offer hope to vulnerable people that they can avoid such treatments is in my opinion a crime in itself.

Tags:
Sylvia Millecam, new age bullshit, alternate "medecine"

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Posted by Martin Wisse at 8:21AM EDT [ Permalink] End of post.