As would 99.999% of Christians and people of other faiths. So what?
Mmm. Well, TB. 99.999 is a lot, but there are a lotta xian scientists. Almost half a million. That's a lotta kids.
wiki writes:
The Journal of the American Medical Association (22 September 1989) reported on a study of more than 5,500 "Christian Scientists" as compared to a "lay group" of almost 30,000. The death rate among "Christian Scientists" from cancer was double the national average, and 6 percent of them died from causes considered preventable by doctors.
That's 24,000 preventable deaths/year.
And they're not the only xian wingnuts who rely solely on prayer.
And thanks to the xian scientists' "good" work ...
wiki writes:
There are now statutes in 44 states which contain a provision stating that a child is not to be deemed abused or neglected merely because he or she is receiving treatment by spiritual means, through prayer according to the tenets of a recognized religion.
44/50.
Yup. That's a lot of dead kids.
Christian Science children have died and continue to die of diabetes, ruptured appendixes, measles, diphtheria, blood poisoning, cancer, and other illnesses that are curable or treatable with modern medicine.
Two Christian Science parents, David and Ginger Twitchell, of Hyde Park, a section of Boston, were scheduled to go on trial shortly for involuntary manslaughter in the 1986 death of their two-year-old son, Robyn. (He died of an intestinal blockage that could have been surgically corrected.)
Andrew weighed only about 105 pounds at his death and was severely emaciated. The Orange County coroner's report listed three causes of death and their duration:
A. Multiple system failure/days
B. Diabetic ketoacidosis/months
C. Diabetes mellitus/months
In other words, Andrew Wantland died of diabetes after months of illness.
Ashley King died in 1988. She was twelve years old, and she had bone cancer ... the tumor on her right leg that was forty-one inches in circumference (the size of a watermelon) ... Her heart was enlarged from the burden of pumping blood to the tumor, her pulse was twice normal, the cancer had spread to her lungs, and she was in immediate danger of dying from congestive heart failure. Immobilized by the tumor, she had been lying in the same position for months. Her buttocks and genitals were covered with bedsores ... Ashley would have had a 55 to 60 percent chance of recovery if she had had timely, proper medical treatment ... She died on June 5, 1988 (after one and a half years of untreated, unbearable suffering).
(Spaulding Gray was raised as a Xian Scientist) "So one day I was in the bathtub taking a very hot bath. It was a cold day and the radiator was going full blast. I got out of the tub. . . . I hit my head on the sink. . . . When I landed my arm fell against the radiator. I must have been out quite a long time because when I came to, I lifted my arm up and it was like this dripping-rare red roast beef, third-degree burn. Actually it didn't hurt at all because I was in shock, a steam burn on my finger would have hurt more. I ran downstairs and showed it to my mother and she said, "Put some soap in it, dear, and wrap it in gauze." She was a Christian Scientist, so she had a distance on those things.
"The next day when I got to school, the burn began to drip through the gauze. I went down to the infirmary, and when the nurse saw it she screamed, "What, you haven't been to a doctor with this? That's a third-degree burn. You've got to get to a doctor right away."
I am certain it was that same complacency that killed a child I knew, Michael Schram, whose appendix burst when he was twelve. His mother, Betty, whom I remember as a very kind, quiet woman, patient with children, sat calmly on their couch with him the night he died and, apparently just as calmly, sat beside his dead body for two and a half days, praying, she later told the local paper, with "the idea of rousing him."
H. R. Haldeman's son Peter wrote recently in The New York Times Magazine about his father's death, in 1993, of an undiagnosed, untreated stomach ailment.
Rita Swan was a Christian Scientist until she left the Church, in 1977, after her sixteen-month-old son, Matthew, died of bacterial meningitis under Christian Science treatment. She and her husband prayed over their son for days, employing two successive Christian Science practitioners; she listened to the baby screaming and watched him convulsing for hours before he died.
... thirteen-year-old Kris Ann Lewin, who in 1981 died at home of bone cancer after an illness lasting at least a year.
... two Christian Scientists who had allowed their seven-year-old daughter to die of diabetes after a long, wasting illness ...
In 1993 Douglass Lundman's ex-wife ... (allowed) his eleven-year-old son, Ian, to die of diabetes in 1989. He had been ill for four days--losing 35 percent of his body weight--and had been vomiting and urinating uncontrollably before falling into the coma.
A fourth-generation Christian Scientist, Shepard has seen many members of her family die prematurely and terribly. Her mother died at age fifty of untreated cervical cancer; her stepmother died of a melanoma on her chest which metastasized; her grandfather developed a melanoma on his cheek which ate completely through the flesh. As a teenager, she was paralyzed for several weeks after fracturing two vertebrae in her neck; her right side is still affected because she didn't go to a doctor until years after the injury.
The parents of a six-year-old girl called to ask her to pray for the child because she had fallen and bruised her arm. The girl herself later called Shepard, crying uncontrollably. Shepard drove to her home and found her alone, lying on the floor with a protruding broken collarbone.
On another occasion a mother called and described her child as having a sore throat. Three days later Shepard visited the child and found that he had swallowed lye and had a hole in his throat.
Suffering Children and the Christian Science Church - 95.04
You know what? I think I see randman's point, TB.
Compound fractures, watermelon sized tumors, comas, convulsions, third degree burns, bacterial meningitis.
It's all good.
Edited by molbiogirl, : sp
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