The Abraham Cherrix Case – and the Hoxsey Therapy – Set for Trial
© By Peter Barry Chowka
Writer, editor, investigative journalist (author bio)
(August 15, 2006) The third week of August 2006 promises to be a major one in the ongoing story of Abraham Cherrix – and the Hoxsey therapy. Cherrix is the sixteen-year-old Eastern Shore Virginia resident whose desire to treat his cancer with the Hoxsey herbal cancer therapy instead of conventional chemotherapy has gotten him into legal trouble and brought unwanted national attention on him and his family.
Late last month, Cherrix was less than a day away from the onset of a state juvenile court judge’s order to report to a hospital for chemotherapy when an appellate court judge suspended that order and instead sent Cherrix to trial on the issue of his future medical treatment (forced chemotherapy vs. the freedom to use the Hoxsey treatment). The trial, in a circuit court, is scheduled to begin on Wednesday August 16th.
Some of the issues relating to the Cherrix freedom of medical choice case and the Hoxsey therapy were the subjects of an article by this author (in which the therapy was examined in unusual detail, considering the paucity of actual reporting about Hoxsey by other journalists) two weeks ago.
The mainstream media have continued to report on the case and it has gained international attention, with stories published in the People’s Republic of China, India, Singapore, and Australia. Several media outlets have recently gone a little more into depth about what is – to them – the mysterious and suspicious Hoxsey therapy.
As is often the case, some of the local media, closest to the principals involved, have done the best reporting. A substantive article dated August 14 by Elizabeth Simpson in the Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot is fairly detailed and objective. It is one of only two that could be found as of this writing in which the writer attempted to contact the Bio-Medical Center in Tijuana, Mexico, the base camp of the Hoxsey therapy. (Abraham Cherrix and his parents visited Bio-Medical last spring after his cancer returned following an initial course of chemotherapy last year failed to arrest it.) Bio-Medical is the oldest alternative cancer clinic in Tijuana, established in 1963 by Mildred Nelson, R.N. (1919-1999), an American citizen who was the nurse at therapy founder Harry Hoxsey’s large cancer clinic in Dallas, Texas from the late 1940s until around 1960. After Nelson’s death, the Bio-Medical Center remained open, under the direction of Nelson’s younger sister, Liz Jonas.
In her article, Simpson repeats the usual litany of negative comments about the Hoxsey treatment by conventional medicine organizations like the American Cancer Society. She also reports “A message left on Thursday for a [Bio-Medical Center] clinic spokesman was not returned. On Friday, questions were referred to director Liz Jones [sic], who was out of the office until next week. People who have sought treatment at the clinic - which only provides outpatient services - say the one-time treatment cost is $3,500, but patients also pay for travel and hotel costs.”
In another article from the region (“The Hoxsey Treatment – The remedy has long been controversial”), published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on August 6th, Shaun Bishop writes:
“Bio-Medical Clinic does not have a Web site, and its director, Liz Jones [sic – it’s Jonas], declined to be interviewed.
“Over the telephone, Aida Flores, a medical coordinator at the center, said it has a long-standing policy of granting no interviews, doing no advertising and providing no information about the clinic's history or current practices.
“It relies on word of mouth to attract patients, she said, and she suggested a reporter search the Internet to learn about Hoxsey.”
A longer companion article in the Times-Dispatch, also dated August 6th and also written by Bishop, is titled “Battling cancer – At home and in court.” It takes a more personal look at the context of the case and the struggles of Abraham Cherrix and his family.
The major national media have weighed in with a number of articles and opinions. On August 13th, Court TV, in an article at CNN’s Web site, reported “Teen battles state over cancer treatment.” The Boston Globe, a left wing newspaper owned by the New York Times company, can be relied on to support state intervention (in effect, “doctors/medical bureaucrats know best”) in cases like Cherrix’. On July 31st, however, the paper published an op-ed column by Cathy Young, a contributing editor with the libertarian Reason magazine, that was more nuanced and less statist than the Globe’s usual editorial-opinion page broadsides. Young’s column, however, after expressing some empathy with the Cherrix family’s dilemma, concludes on a rather equivocal note (one wonders if it was at the insistence of the Globe’s editors):
“The argument for a principled opposition to state infringements on liberty is a compelling one. And yet at what point does such opposition turn into upholding ideology over common sense? It seems to me that when principle and real life collide, any reasonable person has to be torn over the outcome.”
At the least, then, even libertarians, it seems, have been unduly influenced by the cacophony of orthodox experts who insist – contrary to considerable evidence – that there is little or no actual therapeutic value in the Hoxsey treatment – and, therefore, that the issue in the case of Abraham Cherrix comes down to a middle class American family’s ignorant and uninformed choice of medical quackery vs. effective, proven, conventional cancer chemotherapies.
In a lead editorial on August 12th, “Starchild Cherrix’s Choice” (“Starchild” is Abraham’s first name although he prefers to go by “Abraham” these days), the liberal Chicago Tribune concludes, similar to Young in the Boston Globe:
“Cherrix will get his day in court. He'll have a chance to convince a judge that what he's doing is right. We hope that before it comes to that, his parents will rethink their decision and help persuade their son to get the treatment he needs.”
An unusually sensitive article was published on July 30th five time zones away in the Maui News (Hawai’i). “Kahului woman says she was helped by alternative treatment” reports on a 47 year-old woman with stomach cancer for whom conventional treatments failed (she said) and who is doing well after visiting the Bio-Medical Center and taking the Hoxsey treatments.
Some of the most persuasive and uncompromising arguments in favor of Cherrix’ right to choose are found in the University of Maryland’s “independent student newspaper,” DiamondbackOnline.com, in an August 12th opinion column titled “A tragedy in our imperfect nation” by senior American studies major Michael Simonson. Reflecting a sense of youthful idealism and outrage at what he perceives to be a gross injustice, Simonson appears to well understand what’s really at stake in this case, including the imperfect and highly flawed nature of conventional cancer chemotherapy and the difficult, deliberative, and reasoned decision making process undertaken over a period of months by Cherrix and his parents.
“A tragedy is occurring,” Simonson writes, “right this instant in the United States, right in Virginia. . . While it is not wrong that our government wants to protect minors that are harmfully influenced by their parents, this case does not fall under such circumstances. . . This case is about our government wielding its power in a dangerous and immoral way. . . It is acting in a way that better conjures images of a totalitarian society such as the ones that exist in stories such as 1984 by George Orwell. . . The chemotherapy the government is forcing on Abraham does not cure the cancer, and it treats it for only a short period of time, if at all, in many instances. Most important, though, are the chemotherapy's brutal side effects, which could take from Abraham the ability to fully enjoy life ever again. In addition to these resounding facts of the procedure's ineffectiveness (it already failed once for Abraham), there is the reaction of Abraham himself. Another round, at higher doses, ‘would kill me, literally. No joke about it,’ Abraham said to USA Today. . .
“Abe has not gone through the chemo, yet. Not only can his life be saved, but a powerfully important message can be sent. Here is our chance to be like the heroes we see in the movies. Let's rescue Abe, and change the world. Contact anyone with a voice, and tell them this story. Tell them you want the government to free Abraham.”
“Starchild Abraham: His Trip to Tijuana For Chemo-Refusal,” a cleverly titled, page one column about the Cherrix case in the New York Observer on August 7th by the prolific and influential reporter and author Ron Rosenbaum, especially interested this writer. Rosenbaum, who I first met when we both covered the McGovern presidential campaign in 1972, was with me on the day in July 1980 when I visited the Bio-Medical Center in Tijuana – the Hoxsey cancer clinic – for the very first time. (A draft book chapter that recounts from my vantage point the events of that day relating to the Bio-Medical Center can be read here.)
Our long day’s journey into night that began in the early morning in Los Angeles and ended in Tijuana well after dark on that mid-summer day, visiting a total of six cancer clinics before we concluded our trek, was grist for the journalistic mill for both of us. Rosenbaum was on assignment and wrote a lengthy cover story published in the December 1980 New West magazine, "Tales from the Cancer Cure Underground” (included in his 2001 book The Secret Parts of Fortune). The Tijuana clinics were already one of my “beats” and I reported on the Hoxsey clinic and other off-shore unconventional and alternative medicine approaches in a variety of media and other venues for many years afterwards.
Reviewing that experience now, an amazing twenty-six years later, and focusing on the Cherrix case, too, Rosenbaum observes:
I’ve evolved a theory of the below-the-border “cancer cure” clinics, which is that the science, almost without exception, is bogus—but that the cancer patient’s decision to make the break with orthodoxy, to cross the border (a border that is not just geographic but psychological), to take control of one’s destiny and place one’s faith in a cure (however baseless its science), in the psychogenic power of hope (even false hope), might have had some hyped-up placebo effect in making a difference in the lives of those who went that route.
A “false-hope cure”? Well, as I’d put it, “false hope springs eternal,” and there’s growing evidence for the power of the placebo effect.
One can have disdain for the pseudo-scientific, holistic nonsense peddled by the false-hope clinics, but if someone gets to live a little longer by virtue of the false hope/placebo dynamic, should one deny them that chance? Especially in cases of cancers where round after round of ravaging chemotherapy hasn’t offered any hope at all?
So where does that leave Starchild Abraham Cherrix, his parents, the courts, the social workers, his doctors? I just don’t feel I know enough to know. Libertarian instincts and scientific rationalism are generally on the same side, except here strict libertarianism requires a defense of the right to hold false, even self-destructive beliefs. Here libertarianism and scientific rationalism, empathy and efficacy, seem to be in conflict.
You make the call.
I agree with Ron that the reader should make the call, but I disagree that the “science, almost without exception, is bogus” – unless Ron allows for the possibility that one of the exceptions is the Hoxsey therapy. As I noted here on August 1st, the Hoxsey therapy, as unconventional and weird as it may seem to most casual observers, nonetheless has some impressive evidence going for it – not only a mountain of positive anecdotal clinical reports, quite a few of them highly credible and spanning a half century or more, but accumulating hard science that the herbs that comprise the key Hoxsey medications do in fact possess substantial anti-cancer properties. (See releated story.) A major, but not the only, supporting resource on these points is the 1988 review paper on the Hoxsey therapy by the late medical historian Patricia Spain Ward, Ph.D., written for the Office of Technology Assessment’s five year long study Unconventional Cancer Treatments (chapter 4 of which is on herbal medicine including Hoxsey), published in 1990.
This is not the place, nor do I have the energy and the time right now, to go into the long and difficult record of the pros and cons of the Hoxsey therapy. Suffice it to say that, knowing what I do from several decades of first hand experience in both the general field of alternative medicine and (based on a lot of time examining – more than anyone else in fact who is not a principal and therefore hopefully without a self-interested axe to grind) the Hoxsey therapy, the Cherrix’ have made a choice (to employ the Hoxsey therapy instead of chemotherapy) which, in this writer’s opinion, they should be allowed to pursue without more government interference.
But really, the turf war that the state has succeeded so far in winning – shifting the Cherrix case to the shaky ground of a debate about one therapy (conventional) vs. another (alternative) – represents a lose-lose situation for the defendant, Abraham Cherrix, who is also the patient. The state and medical Establishment can always mobilize far more experts, evidence, and testimony to support their side and denigrate the other.
As one attorney told me in 1977, when I covered the first case of this kind (medical freedom of choice involving an underage child), “It’s proper for courts to determine the competence of parents. It is not proper for the courts to make medical judgments.”
The parents back then lost their fight. And sadly, the issues remain the same today.
As WVEC-TV (ABC, channel 13) in Norfolk, Virginia reported on August 14th, “Cherrix family attorney John Stepanovich says the [Cherrix] case isn’t about deciding between cancer treatments. ‘We see this as a case about parental rights and who gets to make this choice and it's always been about the parents making this choice.’” Meanwhile, in another echo from the past, WVEC-TV reports, “The attorney for the State of Virginia, who has declined to be interviewed, says the case is about which treatment is right. He told the judge that Abraham should be treated appropriately as the court sees fit. Appropriate, from the state’s perspective, is the chemotherapy at Children's Hospital of the King's Daughters that has been unsuccessful. The Chincoteague teenager doesn’t want to endure [the chemotherapy] again.”
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