My mom was making lunch when she heard a thump from the bedroom. She found my dad face down on the carpet, blood seeping from a gash under his eye. For days, he had been feeling lightheaded and fatigued since receiving chemotherapy at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He vowed he was done with Western doctors, calling them “crooks” and “quacks,” and done with “poisons” coursing through his body.
That evening, he booked a flight from New Jersey to Arizona to check out a clinic he found online: Envita Medical Centers. Its website claimed a “proprietary” chemotherapy treatment so gentle that patients could hike during care. My dad believed this outpatient clinic, costing nearly $10,000 a week, could save him from Stage 4 lung cancer.
This was predictable. Long before cancer, my father, Rajeev, avoided conventional medicine. A successful entrepreneur, he created a business helping doctors submit insurance claims, giving him an unfiltered look at the medical industry. His own father, an Indian homeopath in Midtown Manhattan, taught that vaccines are dangerous and promoted homeopathy.
My mom, brother, and I tried to persuade him not to go. Memorial Sloan Kettering seemed the obvious choice. But my dad was fixated on Envita’s online testimonials. He would rather spend his money there than line the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry. In the fall of 2019, I dismissed his choices as extreme, but that was before the pandemic eroded trust in the medical system and the Make America Healthy Again movement elevated such skepticism.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing