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LAWRENCE — The doctor who treated a boy who later died after his mother allegedly stopped giving him life-saving medication testified yesterday that she confronted the woman about how she was handling the cancer-stricken boy, but her efforts were in vain.

“I was worried that Jeremy hadn’t received a lot of the medications that I had intended for him to receive, and I was worried about how that conversation would go with his mother,’’ said Dr. Alison Friedmann, a pediatric oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who started treating Jeremy Fraser in October 2006 when he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Friedmann said she warned Kristen LaBrie that she was taking her concerns to the state. And when a social worker confronted the boy’s mother, LaBrie denied withholding the medication, saying to do so would be like “pushing him in front of a car,’’ Kate MacDougall, assistant Essex district attorney, said during her opening statements yesterday in LaBrie’s attempted murder trial.

“She’s charged, ladies and gentlemen, in a sense of pushing him in front of that car,’’ MacDougall told the seven-man, seven-woman jury in Lawrence Superior Court. “She didn’t tell anyone she was not giving Jeremy his chemotherapy drugs. Dr. Friedmann made two horrifying discoveries: that the defendant was not filling the prescriptions and that the cancer was back.’’

Friedmann testified that a team of doctors had managed to push Jeremy’s cancer into remission with potent chemotherapy treatments and that she was optimistic, citing an 85 to 90 percent cure rate, that he could be cancer-free with continued treatments over a two-year span. The majority of those treatments, in the form of pills, were to be given by LaBrie. But prosecutors say she failed to fill the prescriptions numerous times in the initial months of treatment.

LaBrie’s attorney, Kevin James, acknowledged that his client stopped giving her son the pills, but argued that she made that decision in an impaired mental state brought on by her grief from watching the potent treatments affect her son and the constant attention that she, a single mother, had to give Jeremy, who was autistic, nonverbal, and not potty-trained.

“Her mental strength weakened, her objectivity waned,’’ James said, and in that condition, “she made a decision to stop giving him medication. The Commonwealth wants to make this tragic mistake a criminal act.’’

LaBrie also faces charges of assault and battery on a disabled person with injury, assault and battery on a child with substantial injury, and reckless endangerment of a child.

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Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
Chemo costs? You can't get standard cancer treatment for free?

Sheesh.

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Originally posted by Kwicko:

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Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
Chemo costs? You can't get standard cancer treatment for free?

Sheesh.

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Nope, you can't. Not here. That would be "socialism", and saving lives without making enormous profits is "wrong". The rich will gladly pay for their own medications, and the poor are disposable and easily replaceable anyway. That's The American Way™.

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RESULTS: The overall contribution of curative and adjuvant cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adults was estimated to be 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in the USA.

CONCLUSION: As the 5-year relative survival rate for cancer in Australia is now over 60%, it is clear that cytotoxic chemotherapy only makes a minor contribution to cancer survival. ....

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Originally posted by canttakesky:
DT, agreed on the chemo.

This article is a little old, but nothing earth-shattering has been happening in the chemo world since, so you know, this is about right.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15630849

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RESULTS: The overall contribution of curative and adjuvant cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adults was estimated to be 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in the USA.

CONCLUSION: As the 5-year relative survival rate for cancer in Australia is now over 60%, it is clear that cytotoxic chemotherapy only makes a minor contribution to cancer survival. ....

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So...did absence of chemo really cause his death? It would be very hard to convince me if I were on the jury.

The reason I posted this story is because it got me thinking about the charge of murder. Murder used to be something you did, not something you DIDN'T do. To equate an act of omission to murder, you have to have withheld something so important that 99-100% of the time, withholding it would result in death. Like food. Or life-support.

I am disturbed that they are trying to make the case chemo is on the same level of certainty as food or life-support.

I am concerned about the ever encroaching power of the state-sponsored religion of Medicine.

That's just me.

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Originally posted by canttakesky:
DT, agreed on the chemo.

This article is a little old, but nothing earth-shattering has been happening in the chemo world since, so you know, this is about right.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15630849

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
...the discovery of targeted replication inhibitors in 2005 could be described in a word that I might use, say "earth-shattering."

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Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
I guess the issue is whether treatment was withheld consitutes some form of neglect which has led to the death of this child. I think murder is over stated, but from what I can see US laws are quite harsh and punitive. I do believe that a charge of manslaughter might be more appropriate, but even then...it's quite dodgy territory.

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Just a guess... she might have been right. If she had given the kids the pills, and the kid had died sooner, no doctor would now be in trouble.

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Originally posted by canttakesky:

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
...the discovery of targeted replication inhibitors in 2005 could be described in a word that I might use, say "earth-shattering."

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I thought those started being used in the early 2000's. But the criticism is valid. The meta-analysis was of studies completed by 1998, so the chemo technology they studied was "old." Still, a quick perusal through the literature appears to show only a modest improvement with targeted inhibitors--again, nothing that *I* would call earth-shattering. But I'm hard to impress. ;)

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
It's a greater change than any other field of science has gone through recently.

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Survival rates and times often don't change much because most people with cancer are very old.

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It doesn't defeat your point, just saying that you gotta be careful when making blanket statements.

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The reason I posted this story is because it got me thinking about the charge of murder. Murder used to be something you did, not something you DIDN'T do. To equate an act of omission to murder, you have to have withheld something so important that 99-100% of the time, withholding it would result in death. Like food. Or life-support.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
CT, if you starve a child, is that not murder?

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Originally posted by RionaEire:
I saw on the news today that she was convicted of willful murder.

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