Saw this in a local newspaper today. Need I really say more?
Here’s a direct link in case the board software automatically makes the image too small to read:
It’s beyond frickin’ belief. I considered writing a letter to the paper about it, but I nowadays seldom bother with this sort of thing. I did so in the past, and it never earned my anything more than hate mail from the very people I was trying to help.
Good gods…
Poor kid.
Anyway, I know the Rooihuiskraal community quite well, I have quite a few fundamentalist family members residing there.
Save your breath Brian, these people tried to “evict” evil spirits from my (then) five year old son because I had the odasity to divorce his father. They’re not worth the effort.
It’s still sad that these otherwise well-meaning people get taken advantage of like this.
i get the feeling that maybe these folks are having a spot of Munchausen Syndrome.
having been at the receiving end of one of these infrared sauna detox bullshitty things this past weekend… lemme tell you, if you have health issues, you will walk out of it feeling even worse. i cannot imagine being cooked at 48 degrees is good for you.
and a bunch of doctors not being able to pick up a kid has bilharzia? really? what possibly could they have done to this kid that has him near death then?
A R150.00 blood test would have revealed this. Easily. Nobody thought to do it. The modus operandi seems to be “Treat first, you can always diagnose later.”
Criminal neglect. Healthcare is a money-making business.
There’s an unsympathetic school of thought that holds that anyone readily willing to engage in such obvious hooey concerning their own or their loved ones’ health without first diligently checking on its validity, deserves all of the ride for which they get taken. The tragic figure in all of this, the victim, is of course the boy who is entirely at the mercy of charlatans, woomeisters and his dim-witted parents. Those would be the same parents who would be shocked to the core if you (quite rightfully) accused them of child abuse.
'Luthon64
This is what I consider my worst nighmare. Religious people can be so dangerous.
I have the same suspicion. The mother does not come across as credible and they may well just be a bunch of sympathy gluttons. If the child is ill, I am inclined to view the parents as abusive rather than abused. The Rekord’s journalism is poor and uncritical.
Hehehe, what’s new? 
In this case it is even worse - The Rekord is free, and you get what you paid for.
Many questions remain unanswered. Was it a real doctor who made the diagnosis, for example? I have to wonder, given that bilharzia is easily treated (my spell checker is trying to change ‘bilharzia’ to ‘bipolarity’ - go figure). It is conceivable, I suppose. Bilharzia is nowadays not common among the westernized population, and has a range of varying, non-specific symptoms, so perhaps it may not occur to doctors to test for it. And perhaps by the time the doctor made the diagnosis, the family had had it with western medicine, so they accepted the diagnosis but rejected the treatment, preferring to bankrupt themselves on woo-woo instead of having the lad take a simple course of relatively cheap pills.
I have to say though that I have this suspicion that the diagnosis itself was made by a woo-woo practitioner. There is quite possibly nothing at all wrong with the kid, which would be why doctors, after months and months of testing, couldn’t make a diagnosis. I have seen this sort of thing personally: I used to work in a pathology lab, and know from personal experience that a good 80% or more of the patients who come to the emergency room have nothing discernibly wrong with them. There is a massive epidemic of hypochondria raging all over the western world. This was especially the case on Sunday evenings, what with Monday looming, and week after week it was the same patients too.
Anyway, I am very curious to see whether any skeptics will be writing letters to the paper. I’ll check in next week’s issue and keep you updated. As I get older and wiser and more mellow, I am nowadays more amused than anything else by this sort of thing.
Depends on patient reporting everything relevant and the doc asking the right questions… contracting a sudden fever after travelling usually has them testing for stuff like this in no-time.
