Ezekiel Stephan was a toddler who died tragically in 2012 because his parents did not treat his bacterial meningitis with medicine, but rather with quackery. His parents were convicted, then acquitted on appeal. A week ago, his father attacked the Canadian Medical Association for reporting on a petition doctors sent to the court urging that courts overturn the acquittal.
About a month and a half ago, I became aware of the case of Ezekiel Stephan, a 19-month-old Canadian toddler living in Alberta who in 2012 developed bacterial meningitis. Unfortunately for Ezekiel, his parents, David and Collet Stephan, were believers in alternative medicine. They didn’t take Ezekiel to a real doctor. Instead, they relied on […]
If there’s one thing that really animates me and angers me, it’s the unnecessary death of a child due to quackery. Competent adults, of course, are perfectly free to choose any form of quackery they wish for themselves or even to refuse treatment at all (which is less harmful than quackery). Children, on the other […]
Naturopathy is quackery, and, like many forms of quackery, it kills. People who trust naturopaths to treat actual serious diseases instead of using real doctors and real medicine dramatically decrease their odds of surviving a serious illness. While competent adults have every right to make that choice, to use fake medicine instead of real medicine, […]
I’ve written a lot about Stanislaw Burzynski and what I consider to be his unethical use and abuse of institutional review boards and clinical trials. Before that, I used to regularly write about Mark and David Geier and their unethical use and abuse of IRBs and clinical trials. In both cases, I lamented how they […]
