By the time she died, she was the weight of an average three-month-old, her body was covered with angry blotches and her once black hair had turned completely white.
Gloria Thomas was nine months old when she died of septicemia in her left eye. She had spent five months in agony, as her severe eczema was left almost entirely untreated. Her parents, Thomas and Manju Sam, refused or quickly stopped all conventional treatments and relied entirely on Homeopathic remedies to 'cure' their child.
Any improvements in her condition after homeopathic treatment were short-lived, and the rest of the time she was irritable and in pain, crying whenever she was moved and taking refuge only on her mother's breast.
As I've mentioned in previous posts, the little girls skin was so bad, that it cracked and tore when her nappies were changed. She was so ill, so malnourished, that she reminded one doctor of a third world child, rather than the daughter of a successful 'Homeopathic doctor' that she actually was. The infection in her eye was actually melting her cornea.
Doctor after doctor told the jury that by the time they saw Gloria in those last few days her skin condition was unlike any they had seen before.
In the only bit of good news in the entire situation, both her parents are going down for Manslaughter due to Gross Criminal Negligence.
The pathologist who did the autopsy, Ella Sugo, said she had sought advice from experts outside Australia because she had never seen a child so malnourished and her condition was at a level more commonly observed in third world countries.
However, in a stroke of arrogance and disregard for the evidence of his own daughter's death, Thomas Sam has actually stated:
"Conventional medicine would have prolonged her life ... with more misery. It's not going to cure her and that's what I strongly believe."
I find myself disgusted at this man. His wife, at least, cried and mourned her daughter while in court, but this man was impassive and then stated that Homeopathy would have cured her.
How? How could he say that, after witnessing his daughter die? After being told by a dermatologist that he could have cleared her skin up in 24 hours if he had been allowed to use conventional medicine?
I am shocked at the arrogance, the conceit, the sheer unwillingness to accept that his actions killed his own daughter.
I am also still waiting for someone within homeopathy to explain to me why all the homeopathic remedies given to this child, by her Homeopathic Father, Uncle and various other Homeopaths, ALL FAILED and then KILLED her.
Come on. Explain it to me. It should be simple enough for you, considering you guys apparently have all the answers. What, exactly, did they do wrong? Did all those Homeopaths use the wrong remedies?
There's got to be some explanation you can all get behind, right? You normally have one or two, whenever your magic water fails miserably.
Go on.
Explain it to me.
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This makes me so angry.
We make people take tests before they are allowed to drive legally, before they can legally medically treat other people, before they can legally fly planes, yet for the most important job on the planet - being a parent and bearing the future - there's no test, no restrictions, and precious little checking.
When Ken and I decided we would try for our own child, we took every precaution we could to ensure a safe pregnancy. We'd both already stopped smoking four years before hand: I did everything I could to make sure the sprog would have the best start in life. There were no inheritable conditions in either of our families as far as we knew (we both agreed that if there were, we wouldn't even try for kids). We had the most awful scare at my three month check up, when my blood test gave our developing baby a 50/50 chance of having Downs Syndrome - my elder brother was born with it, but as far as I was aware it's not inheritable. I had to have an amniocentesis (which carries its own risk of miscarriage) to confirm one way or the other and then spent two weeks in absolute stress waiting for the results (which were negative). I went on to have a gorgeous baby boy, who has turned into a gorgeous and very intelligent 14 year old (as of writing).
He was breast-fed until he was 13 months old (received wisdom at the time was a year's breast-feeding was a good way to avoid asthma). We've always eaten as healthily as we can, and he's had all his immunisations: the only time he's been hit was when he ran into the road and I slapped his wrist to try to reinforce the message that you don't do that! As we are atheists, he has, of course, not been indoctrinated into any religion, although he has learned about Xianity, Islam, Judaism and Shikhism at school.
We're not perfect - we make mistakes - but he's always been included in everything we do as a participating member of the family, and we've always explained our decisions to him rationally.
We would do (and have done) anything to keep him safe, happy and enabled for life. As far as we're concerned, that's what parents do. That's our function. (Along with loving him, of course.) So this - and the other cases we've heard of recently - makes me feel physically ill. How can people DO this, to their children, their loved ones, their future?
I don't understand. I don't think I ever can.
Maybe this might enable us to push for the baning of homeopathy?
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