Good morning. There’s no easy way to approach a terminal illness. Today, we look at one family’s struggle to make the right decisions. A good ending It is really hard to know the best way to die. Should our loved ones with terminal disease claw at every life-extending intervention, even if it makes living miserable? Should they seek the provider — and the treatment — that makes them feel most comfortable, even if it’s less effective?
Those questions bedevil this moving portrait of Rajeev Thadani’s final months. Faced with a Stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis, he turned away from the chemotherapy regimen that frightened him and signed up for some new-agey healing at an Arizona clinic. For a princely sum, it offered “gentle” chemo, hydrogen peroxide infusions and testimonials from people who professed to be cured.
Trisha Thadani, Rajeev’s daughter, wrote for The Times about what happened next. His distrust of conventional medicine was a prominent feature of my childhood. He treated my brother and me with homeopathy, and got us exemptions for certain vaccines. He was incredibly sharp — and believed doctors would just overmedicate us and make us sicker. After my dad tried to self-treat his symptoms with natural remedies for months, his oncologist prescribed chemotherapy and immunotherapy. He tried one round of treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering and felt so horrid that he vowed to never go back.
My dad was inundated with ads for alternative cancer treatment clinics around the country and in Mexico. He spoke to several other clinics before picking one in Arizona. During our first visit, a naturopathic medical doctor sat with us for nearly four hours. Their treatments were pretty weird — infusions of hydrogen peroxide, doses of ozone gas, coffee enemas. The clinic also sent him to Mexico for a cell therapy that it is not permitted to perform in the United States.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing