Killed by conspiracy bullshit
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77dmp3jjepo
We need to start prosecuting these people for manslaughter.
We need to start prosecuting these people for manslaughter.
Comments
Looks like the brothers of the deceased agree.
Sad thing is that a lot of the people who believe this stuff are otherwise intelligent. Covid broke a lot of people, and the internet allows people to surround themselves with people who reinforce their beliefs, including that anyone who voices disagreement with them is a tool of Satan/Globalists/The Government/Bill Gates/Big Pharma.
She was a Cambridge graduate, her mum was a trained nurse!!!
Consequently, if our faith in key forms of authority to advise us is undermined - we’re very vulnerable to quacks. It is not really about intelligence.
Not sure I buy this. You don't need to have read and understood the research papers to have some sort of idea about what cancer is, and to at least follow along with a description of how chemotherapy works. Sure, at some point you have to trust in the expertise of the person providing the explanation, but you can follow along and notice that the explanation is coherent and self-consistent.
Coffee enemas, on the other hand, do not. We are bequeathed coffee enemas by Dr Max Gerson, an early 20th century quack who specialized in making shit up. There is no rational theory behind treating cancer by shoving coffee up your arse; Gerson's claims about what causes cancer are just wrong, and there is (unsurprisingly) no actual evidence to support a claim that Gerson therapy is useful as a treatment for any form of cancer.
The BBC did a radio investigation into the case recently with a lot more detail. The whole thing is very sad. This was a young woman who was isolated and vulnerable (because she had cancer). If she hadn't been so cut off from her support network (her boyfriend, her brothers, her friends....) this might have been avoidable.
How her mother got down the rabbit hole is a different question.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c749d9557j2o
It happened, though fortunately rarely, I found myself arguing with people at parties. They could be both irrational and strident with little capacity to think analytically.
Sad.
The shapeshifting lizard thing is connected to the rubbish pushed by David Icke. One of the inherent difficulties with policing irrational beliefs is the overlap with culture and religious faith.
Should Jehovah’s Witnesses be able to refuse blood transfusions for their children, would you over rule an adult who refused blood transfusions for religious reasons even if they knew they might die as a result ?
I think the difference here, is that the victim did not think she was refusing effective treatment for ethical reasons. She thought she was choosing a better, more effective treatment.
So there is something about medical regulation perhaps - but then think about what would be needed to regulate homeopathy, chiropractors, crystal healing etc ? Where does the line sit between allowing enough diversity of thought and practice to give rise to new innovation and paradigm shift, and allowing absolute bullshit to harm people ?
It used to be said type 2 diabetes was irreversible, then scientists tested radical weight loss practices being used in alternative wellbeing spaces - and found it worked.
Obviously, this case doesn't sit on the borderline - but framing legislation and regulation is very complex to take account of the temporary and changing nature of scientific knowledge.
Evidence, credible mechanisms - my father's type 2 diabetes disappeared when he lost weight, but there's a credible mechanism for that, given the cause of type 2 diabetes in the first place, and it doesn't fly in the face of all the evidence or require a complete re-writing of existing science, the way that coffee enemas and God help us, homeopathy, would do.
The fact that scientists investigated weight loss as a type 2 diabetes treatment is telling.
This sort of anti-conventional medicine conspiracism is found on the hippy-dippy left too. I think it stems from a sort of pseudo-egalitarianism that dislikes experts having authority and assumes they must have ulterior motives.
The thing is that in the US it's not completely crazy to think that medical and pharmaceutical experts have ulterior motives given that they're part of a huge corporate establishment bent on making as much money as possible. The hippy-dippy extra crunchy anti-vaxxers here don't trust corporations. They shop for organic groceries at farmers markets because they don't trust the enormous corporations that produce and purvey a food supply that is pretty awful. They can point to the corporate influence that put the Common Core standards into our public schools as a reason to home school or send their kids to Waldorf schools; Bill Gates decided it was a good idea, and that's all it took.
Who do you propose prosecuting? The people who promulgate these ideas?
Frankly, yes. It's entirely foreseeable that people believing their bullshit will die from it. Definitely the mother in this case.
The mother in this case, who seems not only to have promulgated the ideas, but also isolated her daughter from people who would try to convince her to have chemo. Paloma's two bothers both hold their mother responsible for her death.
It might depend on what kind of lie we're talking about. If I tell a visually impaired person that it's okay to keep walking in a certain direction, but I can see that leads him right into a knee-high fence, I think I probably have at least some legal culpability if he walks into the fence, trips over, and loses four teeth.
But if I self-publish a book saying that toothpaste is actually damaging to teeth and dentists just promote it to get more business, and that liquid sugar is the thing to brush with instead, do I have the same legal liability if one of my readers, whom I was not directly advising, follows my recommendation and loses four teeth after several weeks of brushing in that fashion?
Although there's also a cross over where you get what can be best termed as a 'cosmic-right'' who are similarly into conspiracism but with different ultimate endpoints.
If you are fed false information then are you making the same decision that you would if you only have true information to go off? Poisoning somebody's mind with lies takes away their ability to make a rational decision.
Amen to that. We see the truth of it every day in the world news and in our own lives.
The story has been covered extensively here. I've listened to the BBC podcast which la vie en rouge links to above. The link in the OP also contains a link to the podcast. Once she was ill, had moved back into the family home and her mother was "caring" for her, she became cut off from friends, her boyfriend, and her brothers, including her twin brother. Various people suggest that as her health declined her ability to disagree with her mother also declined.
Sounds not unlike coercive control, domestic violence is not limited to couples.
This is particularly disturbing if the person doing the influencing is not just a parent but also a person who claims to have medical experience and who doubtless presents herself as having special knowledge of a 'truth', independently of the entirety of the medical establishment.
Shipmates outside the UK also may not appreciate that even before Paloma became ill, her mother already 'had form'. She has been suspended from being allowed to practice as a nurse because of her views on Covid injections and the militant, aggressive and threatening ways she promoted them She was one of the platform speakers at a notorious rally during the pandemic in Trafalgar Square with Piers Corbyn, David Icke and other conspiracy advocates. If anyone thinks I am going a bit far in what I am saying, this is what wikipedia says about her.
It’s not clear cut - how irrational does a decision need to be, before the decision itself is seen as evidence you lack the ability to meaningfully weigh up the information available to you ? Legally, you have the right to make unwise decisions.
If you refuse medical care because you believe that genocidal shape shifting space lizards have directed medical staff to perpetrate a genocide against you, is that less rational than refusing medical care because you think coffee enemas are an effective treatment for cancer ?
"Self evidently" seems like an inadequate thing to hang this argument on. Especially in a forum populated by people who believe a lot of stuff that non-religious folks think is self-evidently wrong. You might argue that you're not hurting anyone with the things you believe, but religion has historically been one of the drivers of some pretty shitty stuff, and still underwrites oppression in many parts of the world, including both yours and mine.
That this case is awful and sad is obvious. I nevertheless think it's hard to talk about prosecuting people for things they say and things they believe in ways that will not one way or another come back to bite you on the ass.
Well, yes. And if an 18-year-old were a year younger, they would not be allowed to vote. But that has no bearing on whether or not they should be allowed to vote as an 18-year-old. The law obviously assigns different levels of rights, responsibilities, and protections to adults than it does to minors.
I completely agree, Ruth. Enoch’s problem is there’s no clear line between reasonable and unreasonable opinions or beliefs that cause one to deny medical treatment (for oneself or for another for whom one is responsible).
There’s nothing inherently more batshit about a belief that vaccines are harmful than about a belief that The Big Sky Daddy hates blood transfusions, but I doubt Enoch would call for JWs to be prosecuted for refusing the latter. Nor is there a significant difference between believing exclusively in the power of coffee enemas and believing exclusively in the power of prayer, though I do note that there have been several cases of parents being jailed for the latter when it meant the death of their child.
I wrote an essay on JWs and blood transfusions for a medical-ethics class at university. My conclusion...
If someone a day under 18 is refusing a life-saving transfusion on religious grounds, the authorities should take him, kicking and screaming if neccessary, tie him to a cot, force the IV into his arm, and administer the procedure.
If someone a day over 18 is refusing a blood transfusion, we should absolutely allow him to go without it, and, if so inclined, laugh at his stupidity as he kicks the bucket due to refusing a simple and readily available treatment.
(Not in so many words, obviously.)
Someone with batshit ideas about cancer has been deceived into thinking that the treatment they're refusing is harmful and does not help them, and that the alternative will be beneficial. It is not informed consent which is being given or refused in the same way.
But presumably, the doctor told the cancer-treatment skeptic that the treatment has been shown to work, but the skeptic decided that the holistic pamphlets he got from his grandma seemed more credible. Does the patient's hearing the doctor's statement render his ultimate decision informed consent? He WAS offered the proper medical explanation.
It's tricky. The patient has been primed to believe that the doctor is lying or brainwashed. The bottom line is that the patient is making a decision based on a delusion as to fact (that the treatment offered is harmful rather than helpful). The JW refusing a blood transfusion is under the (in most people's view incorrect) belief that blood transfusions offend God, but (a) no-one can actually offer any evidence for or against that belief and (b) it isn't about the efficacy of the treatment. They are thus different situations and the conclusion from one cannot simply be applied to the other.
In all these things there are elements of degree, but by any measure of chiropteran coprolite this particular case involves actions on beliefs which have had tragic consequences. That takes it beyond just a matter of discussion and the tolerance of differences of opinion.
As it happens, at lunch time today on Radio 4 there was an additional update in a series of programmes by Marianna Spring, this one covering the Coroner's Inquest and the deep pain of Paloma's twin brother. This is the link but for those outside the UK, I am not sure whether you will be able to access this. Television, you can't, but this is sound radio and I think some programmes are still available internationally as podcasts.
This was not in the schedule beforehand. So it was a surprise. I am not sure whether it had bounced another programme or whether it had been put in to replace another programme that had been bounced. I heard it by chance.
IOW I think you're making a distinction between a falsehood that makes claims to scientific standards and has been disproven by those very standards(eg. vaccines cause autism), AND OTOH one that doesn't make claims to scientific backing and hence has no evidence for or against it either way(eg. Jehovah hates blood transfusions). And, it's a very valid distinction from a philosophical, sociological etc perspective, but I'm not quite sold on the idea that it should have legal relevance.
Suppose the Joneses are JWs who want to deny their 13-year old a life-saving transfusion because they think Jehovah will eternally annihilate them if they allow it. Meanwhile, the Smiths want to deny their child a life-saving transfusion because they read on some crank website that the blood supply is poisoned with a disease that will kill the recipient instantly and mainstream science is covering this all up.
Regardless if their desired course of action is based on religion or pseudo-science, it is still contrary to the general standards of protection society expects parents to follow in raising children, and the results would be equally hatmful in both cases. So, I would want the same degree of state intervention, ie. one helluva fucking lot, on behalf of the kid's physical well-being, in both cases.
And the opposite it the person is over the age of majority, ie. unless you can prove they were being physically prevented from accessing a transfusion that they wanted, no intervention in either case.
I'm also tempted to say that the subsequent punitive measures against both sets of parents should be the same, though I could entertain arguments for comparative leniency for the JWs AND the quack-followers, respectively. Though not one that would apply to both.
Agreed. We've seen that in the past, over the centuries, depending on whose freedom of thought and freedom of speech is being made illegal at any given time or place.
You have one of my distinctions, but not the other one, which I believe to be the stronger anyway - that on the one hand the JW is refusing the treatment despite knowing it's clinically beneficial, while in the other the conspiracy theory victim is refusing the treatment because they wrongly believe it is clinically harmful. I think that also makes a difference - the difference between informed and misinformed consent.
She was a Cambridge graduate, whose twin is a graduate of LSE, whose best friend is a dentist, and whose long term boyfriend was also a graduate. She was raised amongst conspiracy theories, but had steadily moved away from them after leaving home. For example, she had been raised to avoid fluoride toothpaste and sunscreen but had started using both.
When she became ill she went to the doctor, and followed conventional medicine up to, and slightly beyond, diagnosis. Her qualms about chemotherapy were not, originally, about chemo per se, but about her fear of becoming infertile. Her own plan was to follow Gerson etc for six weeks, then have a further scan. If the six week scan showed the cancer progressing, she intended to have chemotherapy.
She then returned to the family home to be "cared" for by her mother. From that point on, her contact with her brothers, boyfriend and friends decreased. She reported to them that she had a new lump growing which was good news because her mother told her it meant that the alternative treatment was working and that the cancer was being pushed out of her body. She didn't go back for the planned six week scan. Her friends all thought (correctly) that the new lump was further tumour growth. There seems to have been a circle of people all aware that things were going very badly for Paloma; horrified observers of an unfolding tragedy that they somehow could not prevent.
I think that usually these tragedies are followed by the question Why did nobody notice that the deceased was becoming increasingly unwell? How could this be hidden from sight in today's society?
But in this case many people noticed and were fully aware of Paloma's declining health and yet were unable to intervene. Her brother notified social services, and engaged a lawyer, but that process wasn't quick enough for any action to take place prior to Paloma's death.
A patient refusing treatment they think is harmful makes more sense to me than refusing treatment they know is beneficial. The first person may be deceived, but the second may be willfully, knowingly risking their life. I don't see why the first person should have social services intervening in their life and not the second.
Because the first person would act differently if they were in full possession of the objective facts, whilst the second would not?
So, in my example of underaged kids in a JW family and a quack-science family respectively...
I assume in both cases you would advocate state-intervention to save the life of the child. But you might advocate harsher penalties for the JWs, because they knew the result of a denied blood transfusion could be death, whereas the crank-science parents were sincerely trying to save their child's life, but were the victims of false information?