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[Rose]

Wait, how do you "traditionally" cure cancer?
Magic?

You die of other causes before getting cancer.

[hops]

But... by Christian logic should it be that
God gave them chemotherapy.
And then
They refused Him.

By refusing chemotherapy, they are basically flipping God the bird.

[Vector]

*sigh*

If traditional medicine doesn't work at all, then why are pharmaceutical-hired ethnobotanists raiding the Amazon rain forest for cures? Chinese medicine has been shown to treat symptoms of chronic conditions better than Western medicine, for starters.

Yes, a lot of it is bullshit. Some isn't. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[Descan]

Edit re Vector: I don't think anyone said that. I know that I never said natural or traditional medicines don't work at all. That lovely thing about "Alternative medicine that has been proved to work is called 'medicine'" fits here. Babies are safe, bathwater is apparently sludge here. This isn't about them choosing something other than chemo that has been proven to work, I could accept that even if it had a lesser chance of working. But... going from 75+% chance of survival to 0%? Should not be acceptable to anyone who values human life.

 Well, to my original post~:

I don't claim to know why they think the way they do. If I did, I'd go insane.

Point is, a child is dying a meaningless, preventable death, because her and her parents are too stupid to know better.

I don't blame the child, she's 10, she's allowed to be stupid. But the parents should know better. And if they can't or won't do what's in the best interests of the child, then I don't think that the medical decisions of the child should be in their hands. I wouldn't go so far as to take her away unless they go against a court order to comply with the best-practices medical decisions of a medical guardian, but unless and until that happens there's no reason to take away anything but the medical decisions.

But I'm especially disturbed by the hordes in that comment section saying it's all for the best. It's one thing for a single family to say something stupid and get in the news, it's another for a majority of 200 comments to agree with that stupidity.

I'm all for people having full and free choice in their lives. But I'm also all for people not dying pointlessly. And to me, the latter trumps the former, especially if it's not even provably their own decision to die pointlessly and painfully, legally speaking she is not considered to have the faculty to decide something like this, and there's no telling whether her parents have basically kept her in the dark about this and that she's just repeating what the authority figures in her life have told her.

[Sergarr]

So, when she dies, will the parents be charged with premeditated murder?

[Descan]

That's happened before with children who have died under the care of parents who chose faith-healing over medical treatments.

Of course, that was in America, and they were not protected under any native rights (being descended from colonial Europeans, assuming America has such native rights re: native medicine. Though, this is a Christian family as far as I can tell, so who knows? They might not be protected because of not having the native religion). In Canada, with a First Nations family, even a Christian one? Unknowable, I don't think it's come up before.

[Vector]

But the problem is, all I see is her saying: "These treatments are killing me and I would rather die than have to continue with them."

(Also, that's a different article than linked in the Facebook comments--so, thanks for that; it adds the background on survival rates which wasn't there originally. I thought it was a worse prognosis than that)

Blergh. I'm speaking from a point of view in which the "traditional medicine manual" I was given as a kid recommended literally giving your kids arsenic for the common cold. For some reason, this situation irks me a little less.

[MaximumZero]

So, in my music class, we have this 'recorder karate' thing going on, with various songs representing belts. Today was my final exam. We had to pick a random paper, and the paper would have a stain of the belt color of whatever song we had to play in the recorder.
I grabbed a paper. It was blank. White belt. Easiest song. Not bad, I can easily manage purple belt and higher without taking more than 10 minutes of practice.

Guess what happened immediately afterward?
Panic Attack.
I took many tries to even start it, and then I just barely made it. Let me repeat: I can easily manage purple belt or higher, so long as I'm calm. However, as soon as I'm told I'm being tested, my brain shuts down.

Y U NO WORK BRAIN

The way you capitalized it made me think you were supposed to transcribe THIS at first.

I am now sad that Panic Attack is not a Rocksmith song. Not like I'd ever be able to play it, but still.

[Descan]

To be honest, my mum went through chemo. She's a strong woman, but even she almost buckled under it.

So I don't think it's a stretch for a child to say "This is killing me" because of the pain, but whether it was actually killing her or not is not something I think she could honestly assess.

And yes, I am aware that some bullshit medicine is more bullshit than others. Arsenic for colds is more bullshit than homeopathy, at least homeopathy won't actually kill you (what with it literally being water). And homeopathy is more bullshit than herbal medicine, at least there's a chance that some actively helpful ingredient is in the herbs (though about as much chance as an actively harmful one, given there's no oversight and no requirement that it be proven to work).

But I don't see why the acknowledgement of different degrees of bullshit and harm should mean that the people perpetrating the lesser degrees of bullshit should get off scot-free because of the past existence of higher degrees. It all is irksome, and should all be resisted.

[Vector]

That's true. It's just that... hm. From my experience studying racism, there's often a lot of technologies which, when not understood, are considered bullshit (usually without having been studied/asked about/whatever). I feel like First Nations people, as people who were colonized, should have the rights in their communities to use the medicine they feel is most suitable. Especially, given historical precedent, without the continuing trauma of having their children taken away. Enough Native kids have been taken away for no fucking reason that I could definitely see why it makes it harder for those communities to feel that the state adequately protects them--that they'd see this as just another excuse to have the kids removed from their families, whether or not that's actually the case.

Now, this isn't a... this is not a "traditional medicine MUST BE BETTER" sort of thing, it's just that there's so much historical precedent that I'm at least open to the idea that they might know better, you know?

[Arx]

The best part about pioneering is messing up your hands.

[Descan]

Sure, and they should be studied if they haven't already been studied, and adopted if they work and rejected if they don't.

[scrdest]

So, in my music class, we have this 'recorder karate' thing going on, with various songs representing belts. Today was my final exam. We had to pick a random paper, and the paper would have a stain of the belt color of whatever song we had to play in the recorder.
I grabbed a paper. It was blank. White belt. Easiest song. Not bad, I can easily manage purple belt and higher without taking more than 10 minutes of practice.

Guess what happened immediately afterward?
Panic Attack.
I took many tries to even start it, and then I just barely made it. Let me repeat: I can easily manage purple belt or higher, so long as I'm calm. However, as soon as I'm told I'm being tested, my brain shuts down.

Y U NO WORK BRAIN

The way you capitalized it made me think you were supposed to transcribe THIS at first.

I am now sad that Panic Attack is not a Rocksmith song. Not like I'd ever be able to play it, but still.

MZ, MZ, MZ, I see that you are unfamiliar with the magic that is Rocksmith cDLC.

There you go. Now downtune that guitar to Bb Standard >.< .

Search 'how to get cDLC to work' in Google, because you will need a modified .dll to get debug mode which is necessary for it to work.

[Trapezohedron]

I don't understand how having 16gb RAM, a quite respectable Nvidia GT 645m, Core i7 on a laptop hooked to a wall charger 24/7 on high performance still causes Minecraft to lag like shit.

As such, I don't know which issue I should tackle on just to make it barely playable. D:<

[Arx]

Step 1: Install Linux.
Step 2: Profit.

I went from unplayable on lowest settings to running smoothly on highest settings by doing that, on a PC with 2gb RAM, no graphics card, and a 1.5GHz CPU.