The results of a recent court case are going to bring on a debate in far-too-tolerant-of-alternative-medicine Canada: Whether parents should be able to take their kids to a naturopath or have to go to a real doctor instead.
David and Collet Stephan's 19-month-old son Ezekiel died in March 2012. What was shocking is that he died of meningitis while they tried to cure him using naturopathic smoothies of hot peppers, garlic, onions and horseradish.
The day before he stopped breathing, and the bearded hipster and his equally dumb hippie wife finally decided to go to a real doctor, he had to lie on a mattress in their car because he was too stiff to sit in a car seat on the way to the naturopath's office.
The issue is not the naturopath they used, that has quasi-legitimacy in Canada and the medical establishment there has to take the blame for not standing up to nonsense inside their borders, the issue is how to protect children from parents that are shockingly stupid. In the United States, if you try to keep a toddler on a vegan diet you will go to jail. And in Canada too. So it would make some sense that a senseless tragedy perpetrated by people who should know better, and chose to deny science anyway, should bring a rethink to Canadian tolerance of medical neglect under the guise of tolerance for cultures where anti-science beliefs hold sway.
If the title ends in "path," alarm bells should go off. Don't be fooled by the term "allopath" for real doctors either, that title was invented by the first homeopath to create false equivalence.
