Commentary

The Case of Abraham Cherrix:

Medicine at Gunpoint Wins Again

(September 15, 2006) Another medical freedom of choice legal drama has just played itself out.

Once again, a minor, underage child was the focus of the dispute, but this time it was not a helpless infant or a toddler but a mature and intelligent sixteen year-old, Abraham Cherrix. After careful research, Abraham, with his parents’ consent, decided to treat his Hodgkin’s Disease with the Hoxsey herbal cancer therapy, available at a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico. Abraham chose this option after a first round of chemotherapy in 2005 made him extremely sick and didn’t stop his cancer from coming back.

Predictably, child protective services in Virginia, where the Cherrix’ live, became involved and the case wound up in court. In July, after a perfunctory hearing, a judge ordered Abraham to present himself to a local hospital for chemotherapy, against the family’s wishes. At the eleventh hour, an appellate judge suspended that ruling and ordered the case to be heard at a full trial.

Abraham Cherrix

It didn’t used to be this way in America. According to several legal experts interviewed by this writer, parents and families in the past had a lot more freedom to determine their own health care options, without meddling by doctors and their nanny-state bureaucrat allies – and without having to claim religious exemptions, either. One attorney commented, “It’s proper for courts to determine the competence of parents. It is not proper for them to make medical judgments.”

Typically, the judgments by officials in the Cherrix case, relying on medical experts who have a vested interest in conventional medicine, like the judgments in similar cases that I’ve reported on going back three decades, were flawed and unfair. For example, cancer chemotherapy was presented by the state as it always is, as if it’s a guaranteed, almost magical cure – which it is not – and the Hoxsey therapy, the oldest alternative cancer treatment in continuous use in the United States, was maligned as an example of primitive, useless, anti-scientific quackery.

But there are many good reasons why the Hoxsey treatment continues to be so popular with Americans, and with people from numerous other countries, too. Unlike conventional medicine or many other unconventional approaches, the Hoxsey therapy has never relied on promotion, advertising, or hype. Instead, awareness of it has been communicated mostly by word-of-mouth reports, from one patient to another, about how the therapy offers real help and hope for people with cancer, at a cost that is ridiculously low – around $3,500 for a lifetime supply of the medications!

In many other ways, the Hoxsey therapy stands in stark contrast to the conventional medical paradigm – represented by the expensive, toxic, disempowering, and all-too-often ineffective cancer therapies that are the only options available today for Americans who opt to stay within the conventional medical framework. In particular, certain aspects of the Hoxsey approach – involving as it does an inexpensive, grassroots, self-care model – are seen by the medical Establishment as representing a dangerous and unacceptable challenge to its continued hegemony.

It is not true that the Hoxsey therapy has no evidence to back it up. In addition to thousands of positive individual clinical reports, or “best case” histories, that are available for review, there are reports in the literature of anti-tumor action on the part of a number of the herbs in the Hoxsey formula. The late University of Illinois at Chicago medical historian Patricia Spain Ward, Ph.D., in a paper about Hoxsey commissioned by the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress in 1988, wrote “Hoxsey treated external cancers apparently with considerable success, even in the judgment of his critics. . . More recent literature leaves no doubt that Hoxsey's formula, however strangely concocted by modern scientific standards, does indeed contain many plant substances of marked therapeutic activity. In fact, orthodox scientific research has by now identified anti-tumor activity of one sort or another in all but three of Hoxsey’s plants.”

Media reports – and there were thousands of them published and broadcast at the height of the Cherrix story this summer – tended to reflect the point of view of the state and various conventional “experts.” The most jarring, but far from atypical, example occurred on ABC World News (August 16, 2006). At the start of the broadcast, in promoting the upcoming segment on Cherrix, anchor Charles Gibson said, “A teenager refuses cancer treatments that could save his life. Should minors be given the choice to die?” The gross inaccuracy and absurdity of construing this as a “right to die” case (when Abraham wants to live!) brought to mind images of assisted suicide, Terri Schiavo, or the notorious Dr. Jack Kervorkian – completely irrelevant to the Cherrix case.

As might have been expected, the Cherrix family, overwhelmed by the tremendous pressure inherent in the situation they faced, made a deal on the day that Abraham’s trial was supposed to start. Abraham agreed to compromise, to be treated by a board-certified oncologist in Mississippi and to undergo some radiation; meanwhile, the judge is not requiring him to submit to any chemotherapy – for now. But he’s still under the court’s jurisdiction, required to report his medical status to the judge for review every three months until he reaches the age of eighteen.

Reportedly, Abraham can also continue to use the herbs, nutritional supplements, and natural diet that comprise the Hoxsey therapy. Of course, his immune system might be too damaged by the radiation – and possibly the resumption of chemo, not to mention the stress he has been and will be subjected to – for anything natural like the Hoxsey methods to ultimately have a chance of working.

After their day in court on August 16^th, the family understandably was relieved to have it over with, and to have avoided a trial. They claimed that it was a victory for Abraham to be allowed to avoid chemotherapy. In the sense that Abraham wasn’t immediately grabbed by police, taken to a hospital, and strapped down so he could be injected with toxic drugs, it might appear to be a sort of victory, although most certainly it’s a Pyrrhic one.

One major difference between the world of today and the 1970s, when these kinds of freedom of choice cases first appeared in the media, is that alternative medicine in 21^st century America has been increasingly absorbed into the mainstream. Orthodoxy has opened its doors a crack to a small number of non-threatening alternatives that can serve as complements or adjuncts to conventional, allopathic treatments. It’s now a world in which complementary alternative medicine is gaining legitimacy and market share.

In the process, however, the once large, diverse, and politically viable grassroots constituency that supported primary alternative therapies has been soothed, co-opted, and marginalized, with the wind largely taken out of its activist sails. Americans have been lulled into thinking that just because we’re now allowed to meditate or to say a prayer while we get chemotherapy, everything’s OK.

When the chips are down, however, as they were this summer for Abraham Cherrix and his family, it’s still very much “medicine at gunpoint” – the power of the medical Establishment and the state standing ready to reinforce their favorite toxic, and even barbaric, treatments on independent-minded patients by coercive and, if necessary, violent means.

And that, in these times of understandable concern about Constitutional rights, privacy, and freedom, just seems downright un-American – and completely unacceptable.

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