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.