In a time longer ago, there was plenty of space in the land for the giants to fight in the old-fashioned way.  The damage they exacted on the environment went mostly unnoticed.  With ever less wilderness left, such destruction was no longer tolerated.  The centaurs saw themselves as the custodians of the forests and the plains and they dealt fiercely with any giant who damaged them.  Consequently, the giants were no longer feared in the way they once were.

The giants were no longer the only ones seeking power over the land.  They centaurs were themselves asking others to officially recognise their importance in bringing balance to the land.  And, while the farmers used to have a strong voice, they had lost much of this to all the people who now lived in the ever-larger villages.

Wizards and witches, who used to be laughed at or ignored, now held some power.  They had successfully concocted potions that gave people a sense of being healthy and staying young.  They even had potions that the dwindling number of farmers could use to grow more crops more quickly.

There was one other group that had gained notoriety and power: the trolls.  They had discovered and were now mining shining minerals that the villagers were willing to pay a lot of money for.  They had also found a mineral that glowed by itself and which could keep the houses warm.  They called it glowium.  This meant that fewer trees had to be cut down for firewood.  The centaurs were divided about whether this was a good thing, because their control over the forests had traditionally given them much of their power.

The witches and wizards warned about using this new-fangled glowium.  They said it was unnatural and would make people sick, but these warnings were largely ignored or dismissed as self-interest; the trolls said that the witches and wizards were just being spiteful.

Instead of the giants fighting for power, they now held popularity contests.  They travelled through the land and in each village the inhabitants and the local farmers would gather and listen to what each giant promised he or she would do for the people if chosen as the most popular.  Yes, now that fighting was no longer the way to decide supremacy, female giants also entered the popularity contests.  And so did some of the centaurs, a few wizards and witches and one troll.

The giants were not used to being chosen on the basis of popularity, so they promised to do things that they imagined the people would want.  Therefore, each time one of them offered something, the other would offer more of it, or something better or shinier.  One of them even promised to ask the tooth fairy to double the amount paid for children’s teeth.  The other giant then promised to pay for the witches and wizards to make available some of their common potions.

The centaurs also wanted to be in the power game, but they didn’t have the same clout as the giants.  They urged people to consider a power-sharing arrangement, such that both giants would be voted as equally popular and that one of the centaurs would share all decision making.  The centaurs thought that this would help them protect the forests and the plains, because the chosen centaur could side with whichever giant made the best decision for those things the centaurs considered needed protecting.

The trolls, on learning of the centaurs’ plans, argued that they should also be in on this arrangement.  No-one liked the trolls and told them so.  To keep the trolls happy and out of the way, the giants decided to let them keep most of the proceeds from their digging and mining.  The trolls considered this briefly and accepted it as a fair deal.

Because the two giants were so similar in what they promised people, the people found it hard to choose.  It was finally decided that one of them could be most popular for three years and then the other would be most popular for the next three years and then they would swap again.  One of the centaurs was chosen by his own kind every three years to be with the giants and help them to make good decisions.

The witches and wizards continued to concoct ever more wonderful potions and the trolls kept right on digging and mining and growing rich.  Most of the people were happy, provided no-one demanded too much of them and they were by and large left to get on with their lives.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

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SAD, CFS, IBS, ADD, ADHD, ASD, CVD, BCC^*, DVT^*… some of the acronyms of modern health and its challenges.  Are they increasing in prevalence because of changing diets and changes in agricultural practices or are they a passing fad, a fashion?

Having worked for sixteen years for the acronymous ACNEM^*, dedicated to educating MDs^* and RNs^* on the prevention and treatment of many of these disorders, and now being associated with ACMN^*, I know that there is much that is real about them.

Some are probably the invention of drug companies looking for new markets.  Oppositional Defiant Disorder¹ used to be simply the propensity of teenagers to revolt against authority.  This should be considered a healthy thing, provided there are responsible adults around to keep the boundaries in good repair.  Also, some years ago, research was published that potentially fifty million USA women suffer from Female Sexual Dysfunction².  This was ‘discovered’ by a drug company that had just the drug for it, sitting on the shelf.

There are experiences which have been with us for as long as anyone can remember.  There have probably always been people whose moods changed with the seasons: up in summer and down in the cold, dark winter.  Having officially recognised Seasonal Affective Disorder and given it a name, has opened up the possibility of effective help for these people.

Other acronymic conditions are increasing in prevalence and the cause is probably a mixture of changes in diet, lifestyle and medical practice.  Increases in such conditions as Attention Deficit Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder may be connected with increased vaccination of children at an increasingly lower age and are very likely connected with the huge increase in the consumption of wheat; highly refined wheat is used in most processed foods, along with sugar.  These days it is even hard to find cornflour that is made form maize instead of wheat.  Food additives can also play a role.  In some places, notably Western Australia, there is an over-reliance on drugs such as Ritalin, when changes in diet can often be effective and much safer. ³

There is a vigorous debate about the impact of Genetically Modified Organisms on our health, with more and more of what we eat containing them; especially processed foods, which often contain genetically modified rapeseed oil (canola), cottonseed oil, maize flour or corn syrup.  Like mass vaccination, there has been little good research done to show it is safe.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are other maladies which have a strong connection with the things we eat and the quantities in which we eat them.  There are indications that they may also arise from the overuse of antibiotics and the continuing failure of the majority of doctors to recognise the curative role of injected vitamins in megadoses.

I am not critical about the people who end up in a hospital ER^*; this is an area in which modern medicine excels.  However, many patients in ICUs^* may not have ended up there if they had had access to, and encouragement to use, NEM^*.  Many degenerative diseases, such as cancer, Cardio-Vascular Disease, diabetes, dementia and Rheumatoid Arthritis can be avoided by most people by paying attention to living a healthy lifestyle, including diet, sleep, exercise, nutritional supplementation when needed and dealing appropriately with stress.

Like in orthodox medicine, with its PPIs^* and NSAIDs^*, the non-orthodox medical field is awash with acronyms for its treatments: IVC^*, EDTA^*, DMSA^*, ALA^*.  All medicines legally available in Australia (including nutritional supplements) are controlled by the TGA^*.  Doctors may belong to the AMA^*, the RACGP^* or the ACRRM^* and keep up to date with their CPD^* by reading the JAMA^* the NEJM^* or the BMJ^*.  They may send you to a NATA^* member for an FBC^* or to the RMH^* for a GTT^* or a CAT^* scan.  Your doctor may carry out an EEG^* or an ECG^*.  You may augment the advice your doctor gives you with information from the WWW^* or rely on reports published by the HWT^* or in the SMH^*.

Anti-ageing ‘medicine’ is another area with spurious remedies and its own acronyms.  In Australia, the foremost body is A5M^*.  Many doctors use HGH^*, DHEA^* and other hormones, as well as a raft of cosmetic procedures, in a bid to keep their ‘patients’ younger-looking.  What we need is vigorous ageing, not anti-ageing.

I should be fine for some time, provided I keep my BMI^* and BP^* within healthy limits and eat plenty of FFV^* and avoid too much food with a high GI^*.  This way I won’t stress my GIT^* and should not have to concern myself with PSA^* levels.

1. see for instance: www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcarticles.nsf/pages/Oppositional_defiant_disorder

   and:

   http://aacap.org/page.ww?name=Children+with+Oppositional+Defiant+Disorder&section=Facts+for+Families

2. see for instance: www.rnlb.tpius.com/downloads/nrd1636_fs%20(4).pdf
3. see for instance: www.upliftprogram.com/article_adhadd.html
   and: www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/12/1047431094426.html

*

• Basal Cell Carcinoma
• Deep Vein Thrombosis
• Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine
• Medical Doctors
• Registered Nurses
• Australasian College of Medical Nutrition
• Emergency Room
• Intensive Care Units
• Nutritional and Environmental Medicine
• Protein Pump Inhibitors
• Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs
• Intravenous Vitamin C
• EthyleneDiamineTetraacetic Acid
• DiMercaptoSuccinic Acid
• Alpha Lipoic Acid
• Therapeutic Goods Administration
• Australia Medical Association
• Royal Australian College of General Practitioners
• Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine
• Continuing Professional Development
• Journal of the Australian Medical Association
• New England Journal of Medicine
• British Medical Journal
• National Association of Testing Authorities
• Full Blood Count
• Royal Melbourne Hospital
• Glucose Tolerance Test
• Computed Axial Tomography
• Electro EncephaloGram
• Electro CardioGram
• World Wide Web
• Herald and Weekly Times
• Sydney Morning Herald
• Body Mass Index
• Blood Pressure
• Fresh Fruit and Vegetables
• Glycaemic Index
• Gastro-Intestinal Tract
• Prostate-Specific Antigens
• Austral-Asian Association of Anti-Aging Medicine
• Human Growth Hormone
• DeHydroEpiAndrosterone

© 2010 Daan Spijer

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Living in a community is a complex undertaking.  It involves a balancing of private and public concerns.  There are some issues that are of concern to the community as a whole and some that are purely private.

As a general proposition, parents should be left to get on with the care and upbringing of their children.  If they experience difficulties with this, then there is a place for the community to offer support.  This was the norm when most people lived in smaller, rural communities than is the case now, when the majority of us in Australia live in a small number of huge and large cities.  In the past, if there was illness or injury in a family or a breadwinner was out of work, the neighbours and others would step in and help out in all manner of ways.  This might include children staying with relatives or friends for a while, until things at home were sorted out.

In such small communities, there was the possible downside of many people knowing much of your personal business; which was also part of the upside, because people were aware what was going on.

Much of the caring about and intervention in private affairs has now been institutionalised.  In theory, this should ensure that everyone who needs help receives it and that such help is of the highest standard.  Unfortunately, this is not the realty.  Many people receive no help and, among those who do, the help is often inadequate or ineffectual.  In the worst cases, the intervention is both unwanted and unnecessary.  There is too much heavy-handedness perpetrated by government agencies that have the responsibility and power to intervene.

As a society, we have a responsibility to look after our most vulnerable members.  This includes children.  However, this looking after should not amount to cosseting children to protect them from all the vicissitudes life has to offer.  Dealing with these vicissitudes offers important lessons to children.  Protecting them from all of them may be the worst thing we can do.  Learning to deal with adversity is an essential lesson for later life.  Striking a balance between exposure to such lessons and protection from really bad things is not easy.  The aim is to steer children through life in order that they survive, healthy, intact and relatively wise, into adulthood.

I have known people who appeared to have had ideal childhoods – loving, supportive parents, enough money, good schools – who as adults had problems such as alcoholism, depression and/or a tendency to violence.  Others, who had grown up in abject poverty, even with uncaring or violent parents, grew up to be well-adjusted adults who were able to form stable relationships and be good parents themselves.  There is so much that is not understood about what makes people who (and how) they are.

When it comes to children, it is very difficult to make rules about when they are mature enough to make choices about their lives.  They certainly do not have the knowledge, experience and life skills of adults but, when it comes to life-threatening illnesses, children often demonstrate great clarity and wisdom about what they want.  They are capable of understanding the implications of treatment options, if these are explained to them honestly and clearly.  The worst thing anyone can do to a child, teen or adult with a life-threatening illness, is to be patronising and withhold information.

Questions of whether to have treatment or not and whether to live or die are very personal and should not be answered by doctors or other professionals – in most instances their whole training has been to keep people alive at any cost.  For children too young to understand or to make such choices, the appropriate people to do that for them are parents.

It is my experience that we do not make effective decisions purely on the basis of what we know – the final choice of one side or the other of the fence is made on the basis of intuition and feeling.  This is especially the case the more the choices may be life-changing.  The more that hangs on the choice, the less the facts are ultimately taken into account.  It is this, more than anything else, that makes it wrong for professionals to make such choices for others.  The professionals themselves make choices on the basis of intuition and feeling, together with years of gathering data, information, statistics and training, which can skew their ability to choose wisely.   They are not the ones who have to live with choices they make for others.  They are not the ones who have to make ongoing adjustments as the consequences of those choices unfold.

Every human being on this earth lives his or her life based on a view of the world and of the cosmos.  For the majority, such views are based on a shared view of one flavour or another, with some holding views that are non-conforming or even unique.  We may have our own opinions about any of those views being right or wrong.  However the individual makes his or her choices in life, they are to be respected without judgement by others and, except in the most extreme cases, such choices should not be made for them.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

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I lie on the damp earth under a multi-hued canopy.  Sunlight plays around and over me, as do the many insects.  My clothing, derived form earth-sucking plants, again soaks moisture from the ground, but I can draw no physical nourishment from this.

Like other animals, humans seem relatively inefficient in gathering what they need to survive, but they have the advantage over plants in being able to go to where the nourishment is. If the soil in which a plant finds itself runs out of water or an essential mineral, the plant generally cannot move to find replacements.

While animals will range to find food and water, humans often venture abroad to fill (arguably) less essential needs – adventure, power, spiritual fulfilment… Yet there are people who seem content to live their entire lives within cooee of the place they were born.  I have met people who never ventured more than ten kilometres from the bed where they were conceived.

Of course, we can now do our travelling in a virtual world.  We can use the Internet to simulate flying over almost any part of the world and, in many places, alight and explore at street level.  You can totally avoid the discomfort and expense of physical adventuring.  Also through the Internet, you can read foreign newspapers, browse in foreign libraries and visit museums and art galleries, watch sports events and even images from people’s gardens.

The opportunities for virtual experiences are burgeoning.  We can now not only ‘get a life’, we can get a Second Life.  For those not in the know, this latter phenomenon is an on-line facsimile of existence on Earth and in space, for which many people will pay with earth-bound money and through which some have become millionaires.  Thousands of people spend the majority of their ‘leisure’ time in this non-place: partying, adventuring, loving, ‘living’.

Is it necessary for us to experience everything in the ‘real’ or physical world for our experience to count towards a fulfilled life?  Our current knowledge of how the brain works would suggest that it is not necessary to taste, smell, touch, see or hear physically – the brain cannot distinguish between what we experience and what we think we experience; so the scientists tell us.

I suspect that it may not be quite that cut and dried.  I feel that there is a qualitative difference between on-earth and on-line experiences.  My brain tells me that to pretend to trek through the wilderness mediated by a computer screen would not be the same as doing it rough in a ‘real’ jungle.

Mind you, I have been totally lost in places I have never been to with people I have never met while reading an excellent novel.  I felt I could smell the dank forest, hear the rustling in the undergrowth as the marauding beast came ever closer to the would-be victim.  My heart would beat faster as the hero galloped towards the scene to affect a rescue.  I’ve cried while reading a heart-wrenching passage in which someone’s loss was rendered in excruciating detail.

As a writer, I attempt to take the reader into a virtual reality and make it as ‘real’ as I can.  For writing to achieve this, it has to make the reader be willing to exclude outside stimuli that would get in the way.  This is much easier to achieve with film, where vision and hearing can be immersed in a dark space where the real-world is excluded – except when the person behind you keeps unwrapping lollies.

Something that intrigues me is the ability to not only take someone into a make-believe world, but to populate that world with computer-generated, animated toys or purely make-believe characters and have adults care about an unloved doll to the extent that they will cry over its plight.

We tend to impart meaning on almost everything we think we experience.  How does this help us obtain the physical and emotional nourishment we need for survival?  For instance, when it comes to choosing a mate, our propensity for responding to what we imagine, makes this area of human experience fraught with mistakes, wrong beginnings, lost opportunities, difficult endings and children who imagine they are the cause.  This then colours their imagination, to repeat the response to imagined reality.  Many mystics talk of needing to wake up from the dream we call life into the real world.  Are we dreaming that we are awake?  Do we create the reality around us, or does it create us?

No wonder most of us have such a skewed and wrong-headed attitude to almost everything around us.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

To receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan [dot] spijer [at] gmail [dot] com>

I love the changing seasons we experience in Melbourne.  I like change.  Change brings challenges and keeps me alert and alive.

The extremes in temperature are temporary, unlike in London (where I lived for some years), where there can be ice on the footpaths and roads for weeks on end.  Here we have the odd, short run of near-freezing nights and, in summer, short forays into the forties (Celsius).  You can anticipate a change within a few days.

What is a challenge, is the response to hot and cold weather by shop owners and business managers.  When it is 12°C outside and I am all rugged up, it makes no sense to have to strip down to shirtsleeves because the shop I have entered had the thermostat set to 22° or even 25°.  For people coming in and out, 18° would be less of a shock and jumpers or jackets would keep the staff inside comfortable.  And in summer, shops can be 15° cooler than it is outside, making me wish I’d been carrying an otherwise unnecessary jumper.

At home, kids may need to be educated to wear jumpers inside, instead of cranking their heaters up to sauna level while they sit around in t-shirts.  A greater willingness to endure the ups and downs of the weather would be healthier and would go some way to reducing our impact on the environment.  This could also lead to a greater ability to weather the ups and downs of life.  We could all be more resilient.

We seem less prepared to put up with the vicissitudes of life than I remember we were thirty or forty years ago.  Or is that just my failing memory?  Maybe it is a consequence of fewer people living in the country (relative to the number of city dwellers).  The city offers more resources for smoothing things out – temperature, inclemency, human waste – and supplies reliable electricity, TV, mobile phone coverage, Internet, etc.

Most of our cars offer ‘climate control’, which may explain why so many people seem to live in the fairytale where humans can control nature.  It is only a further short step to feeling something is wrong when we cannot control the rest of life.

A program now operating in over a hundred primary schools (the brainchild of cook and writer Stephanie Alexander) is a wonderful way of bringing children to a more accurate view of the world.  It teaches where food comes from as students grow their own vegetables and use them to prepare meals in class.  These children are no longer under the illusion that food comes from the supermarket.  It is a step towards re-appreciating our inseparability from our environment and better government support for the program would help improve overall health.

It brings me back to those societies in which inseparability from the environment is probably not even discussed, because everything about their lives honours the fact that they are part of everything in their world.  Thus, they naturally live the rhythms of everything around them.  Although we pay lip service to this in, for instance, our burial ritual when we intone, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, most of us live our lives believing the words in the first book of the Judeo-Christian Old Testament, which appear to encourage humankind to exercise dominion over the entire biosphere, as well as over the land and sea.  That the same ancient document appears to also exhort humans to look after it all, seems to be too often forgotten.

Those people fortunate, or wise, enough to not consider themselves as superior to the rest of creation, find themselves expending less energy in an attempt to change what really is not theirs to change.  There are things that need to be let be.  Maybe the ‘Serenity Prayer’ should be extended to include the line, “… and grant me the humility to leave alone those things that are not mine to mess with.”

Much of the messing around we do comes form thinking that ­now­ we know how it all works; now we understand.  No we don’t!  What this hubris makes clear, is that we consistently forget that, historically, there has always been an attitude of finally understanding how the universe works.  We laugh at the naïvety of past generations and don’t realise that in a hundred years (or less) our own naïvety will be laughed at.

If we want there to be a good chance of there being anyone around in a hundred years to laugh at our naïvety or stupidity, it is incumbent on us to teach our children, our politicians and our business leaders what it would be wise not to mess with.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

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Ken Crispin’s The Pursuit of Justice (reviewed) is stimulating and thought-provoking.  It reminded me of what I enjoyed about being in legal practice in the 1970s and why I have continued to care about how we live our lives and why we need to avoid going to sleep as successive governments pass ever more laws in response to the outrage expressed through the media about the ever-increasing lawlessness in our communities.  That lawlessness may not in fact be increasing seems irrelevant to the media and to most politicians.

More recently, I read Sarah’s Last Wish by Eve Hillary (reviewed).  Its subtitle (‘A chilling glimpse into forced medicine’) is a warning to the reader.  As CEO of the Australasian College of Nutritional & Environmental Medicine (ACNEM) I was peripherally involved in the closing events of this narrative in 2004.  Knowing much of what happened around the last 1½ years of Sarah’s life, I knew I was in for bouts of anger and feelings of frustration and grief.  The book is wonderfully written and is a tribute to Sarah’s courage and that of her family, in the face of overwhelming odds – standing up to the full might of a bureaucracy gone mad.  I also feel good about any contribution I may have made to the postgraduate training of doctors who are able to offer people more than the restricted orthodox ‘treatments’ available for many degenerative and life-threatening diseases.

It angers and saddens me that those things we take for granted – our privacy, our freedom to choose our medical care or to refuse medical care, and the honesty and openness of healthcare professionals – have still to be fought for, because governments and bureaucracies continue to want to curtail these and from time to time doctors, social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists choose to gang up on a hapless citizen.  Unfortunately, we cannot always rely on the Courts to protect us or to correct the wrongs which have been perpetrated.  As a lawyer, it also angers me that there are other lawyers who see their clients’ interests as being secondary to their own interests or who are too timid to stand up for their clients.

Set against this, it was a pleasure to recently watch a documentary about a government doing something right in a difficult area.  The Queensland government has been able to cut through a spaghetti bowl full of red tape in dealing with the problems of the largely Aboriginal community of Lockhart River in the far north of Cape York [map].  To see the positive results of an intelligent and compassionate approach to issues which are often labelled as intractable, helps to dispel my negative feelings after reading the books mentioned above.  Not that I regret reading the books.

There is some positive news to be found of the not-sickly-sweet variety, but one has to make an effort to find it or be lucky to stumble upon it (as I was with the Lockhart River story).  By the way, it is well worth watching it on-line at www.abc.net.au/messagestick.

While there is an overwhelming number of things that are wrong about our society and all of them need to be addressed and all of us should do something to help address them, no one person can take on all of them.  Thus, each of us must choose one or a small number of issues to work on and do so in such a manner as is appropriate for us.  Each of us has different strengths, different expertise and experience, our own level of tolerance, energy and courage.

Right now, I feel that my most powerful tool is my ability to write clearly and my most useful option is to put that writing to work to promote necessary change.  When I was in my twenties, my most useful and powerful tools were related to my legal training and I used these effectively for some years.  And I know what it is like to be threatened, including receiving serious death threats from a multinational company because I was helping people to resist its demands for unconscionably high (and illegal) rates of interest.

I have met other people who have taken action to right wrongs or alleviate suffering, often at great personal cost.  Yet they would do it again, despite the costs, because the reward is the feeling that comes with doing it – the sense of achievement in doing something that benefits many others.

What is it that you see needs changing and what are you going to do to make change possible?

© 2010 Daan Spijer

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Sarah’s Last Wish: a chilling glimpse into forced medicine

I have found this book very difficult to read, because it is so well written.  It is the subject of the book that has gripped me by the throat and made breathing difficult.  Eve Hillary is a masterful storyteller and this book is a fine tribute to a courageous girl and her family and a powerful condemnation of professional incompetence and negligence, unethical behaviour and bureaucratic excesses.

Sarah died, aged thirteen, on 25 October 2004, the victim of a system which was originally set up to support children like her.  It is arguable that the system hastened her death.  It is not arguable that the system utterly failed her and her family.

Sarah developed an extremely rare and aggressive cancer that is believed to be incurable, yet she was forced by the Department of Community Services (DoCS) in NSW to undergo chemotherapy, against her expressed wishes and those of her family.  Eve Hillary, knew Sarah and her family and writes the account of the litany of lies, misrepresentation, incompetence, callousness, self-interest and bloody-mindedness with restrained passion and unrestrained compassion.  The book documents a system gone wrong and the fight put up by Sarah and her family to resist its power.

One could expect a government department which has been set up to protect children from harm to fulfil this function where a child truly is at risk of harm, including possibly removing the child from her parents’ control if necessary to prevent further harm.  But to force a girl who has a recurring ‘incurable’ cancer to undergo useless (often fatal) chemotherapy is beyond the pale.  The DoCS behaviour and actions and the draconian Supreme Court orders they were able to secure, were made possible by misrepresentations and a raft of deliberate lies told by oncologists and other doctors, and these doctors’ refusal to give Sarah’s family any meaningful medical reports, which would have allowed the family to attempt to secure a different outcome.

When a government department is given almost unfettered powers, there needs to be a system in place to ensure that those powers are not used unnecessarily or arbitrarily.  There is no imaginable reason in the case of Sarah that DoCS would need to tap phones, break into private houses, steal letters and personal documents and subject the entire family to overt and covert surveillance.  That these things happened is an indication of a government department gone feral.

Case workers in DoCS even used the threat of removing Sarah’s five siblings to get the parents to obey their orders; orders which, through decisions in the NSW Supreme Court, had the force of law.  This overbearing approach was also adopted by most of the doctors and nurses ‘looking after’ Sarah and by supposedly independent social workers and lawyers.

The family was also badly served by their own barrister, who refused to speak up on father Mark’s requests to put matters to the Supreme Court judge, including the fact that the oncologists had consistently failed to give Sarah’s parents the medical files the Court had ordered them to hand over.  In relation to this last failure, the barrister said to Mark that she would not pursue the issue “against such respectable parties”.  In later Court hearings, Mark felt compelled to represent Sarah’s interests himself, apart from the fact that this useless barrister was costing him an unaffordable $5000 per day.

In 2003 it was Eve Hillary’s decision to write a journalistic article about what had been going on – especially in relation to the forced chemotherapy, bogus emergency splenectomy and refusal of the hospital to feed Sarah an adequate diet – that started changing things for Sarah and the family, but only marginally and too late to give Sarah the opportunity to pursue a course of treatment (of her choice) which may have afforded her a longer life.  Eve’s decision to make these events public cost her the medical clinic she had set up, where Sarah received the only decent medical attention she had during her illness.  The clinic was forced to close through actions of the NSW authorities, because of Eve’s temerity in helping Sarah and her family stand up to DoCS.

If the Australian place names (and people’s names) had been left blank, most readers of this book would assume that this terrible, bleak story, if actually true, had taken place in some foreign country which was under the yoke of a tin-pot dictator.  The story is true and took place, recently, in Australia, which we would like to think is a free society that honours and protects individual rights and freedoms and where forcing unwanted medication on an intelligent and lucid girl would be impossible.  We would also be horrified to think that medical and other professionals would deliberately lie with apparently no regard for the effects these lies would have on the health of an individual.

There is a sense by the end of the book that Sarah may not have died in vain, as she had a wonderful effect on many people she interacted with and there is some positive change in the attitude of DoCS and it is less likely that another child in NSW will be forced to go through the horrors that Sarah and her family experienced.  But the suffering forced on Sarah is inexcusable and cannot be ameliorated in hindsight just because its exposure may bring changes.  It should never have happened.

The DoCS bloody-minded pursuit of Sarah amounted to cruel and inhumane treatment, if not actually torture.  This is also true of the hospitals’ consistent refusal of adequate pain relief, their failure to discus palliative care, their refusal of an adequate diet, their psychological and emotional tormenting and their deliberate lying and hiding of facts.

This remarkable account is also about: the love and internal strength of a family subjected to the worst excesses of a State bureaucracy; the tenacity of a father in doing everything he can to try and protect his daughter; a small number of health professionals and others who stuck out their necks at the risk of their own freedom and livelihoods; the relative safety, efficacy and benefits of injectable nutrient therapies, including high-dose intravenous vitamin C, as an adjunct to other common therapies and in palliative care; and the amazing maturity and clarity of a pre-teen girl dealing with a life-threatening illness and at the same time faced with a hostile world she could not understand.

The lunacy of the DoCS attitudes and actions is illustrated by the cost to the taxpayer of pursuing forced medical treatment for one girl.  Eve Hillary says in the book:

“In the past 18 months the child protection department had spent over a million dollars and diverted an army of case-workers just to prevent one 11-year-old child from having a cancer treatment personalised to her needs, while over 80 children in NSW, who had been reported to DoCS, had died of genuine abuse and neglect.”

Although reading this book can easily be an ordeal, I suggest everyone should make the effort.  It is not just a difficult-to-take account of injustice and heartache – it is a wake-up call to all of us that governments and government departments can easily take away everything we treasure and hold sacred, including our privacy, our freedoms and our rights.  Their doing so and their reasons for it must always be questioned and challenged.

I also recommend you read Ken Crispin’s recent book, The Quest for Justice (Scribe, 2010), especially his last chapter.  When you’ve read Sarah’s Last Wish, I recommend you stay informed about the issues raised, by subscribing to up-to-date information through www.sarahs-last-wish.com

© 2010 Daan Spijer

[to receive an email each time a new review is posted, email me: <daan [dot] spijer [at] gmail [dot] com>]

When I installed the first dog flap, I had to teach them how to use it, coaxing them through with the promise of a treat on the other side.  They soon got the hang of it, but if one followed on the heels of the other, he got whacked on the nose by the return swing of the flap.  A few such mishaps and they both learned to wait for the first swing and dive through on the second.

The cat and her personal flap in the high bathroom window were a different matter.  I have yet to be able to teach a cat anything, with or without a treat.  With her it was a case of pushing her through a number of times until she got the idea.  When we’re home, she still prefers to have the front door opened for her, rather than make the effort of jumping up on the window sill and pushing through the flap.

The younger, larger dog (Willow) has a trait I’ve not seen in a dog before.  He invents games for himself and then tests himself.  For instance, he will drop a ball in front of the couch and watch it roll underneath.  At the last moment he will lunge and retrieve it.  He experiments with dropping it at different distances from the couch and at different places along the couch and watches how it rolls and tries to lunge and retrieve it at the last moment.  Occasionally he leaves it too late and asks me to move the couch.  He’s getting better at it.

The other, older dog (Murphy) finds this behaviour frustrating, because he would like to have the ball to bring it to me and have me throw it into the next room for him to chase and bring back to me, if Willow doesn’t get to it first, to continue his drop-it-in-front-of-the-couch game.

Willow doesn’t understand giving me the ball so I can throw it again.  Actually, he does understand but doesn’t want to relinquish possession.  He’ll stand in front of me, chewing the ball and occasionally he will drop it in front of me and catch it before it hits the floor.  He has, however, found a solution.  He’ll drop the ball near the couch and step back to allow Murphy to get it and bring it to me to throw.  It works.

Willow wants to have everything that’s going.  If there are two balls available, he’ll put them both in his mouth and try to play his usual game.  If I give the dogs one ball each, he’ll want the one that Murphy has.  So like children and their toys – some are happy with whatever they have while others want what someone else has.  So like adults and their toys – cars, houses, boats …

While the dogs are tearing up and down the house, the cat sits on her favourite chair, watching them.  She’s black with huge round eyes.  Sometimes all you see are the two eyes, like those enormous eyes on an owl.  The only thing that gets her running around the house is the pursuit of a mouse.  This time of the year these rodents come inside for warmth and the food scraps under the teenager’s bed.  The cat (Paris) tends to catch them and bring them to us alive, if terrified, to be held by the tail and released into the jungle of the creek reserve next to the house.

There are other unwanted wild visitors, including at least one possum in the roof.  This cheeky squatter occasionally pokes its nose down between the stationary blades of the ceiling fan in the kitchen to see what’s cooking.  Yes, we need to get up soon in the middle of the night to seal the hole it uses and trust it will decide to use one of the possum boxes we have provided, rather than have it pull another tile off the roof.

Some spiders we let stay for a while in the odd corner, where they help to keep down the mosquito population.  The larger, hairy, hunting types we catch with a glass and a sheet of paper and release them where the mice are freed.  Flies are dealt with by employment of a swat (or, as one four-year-old called it, a splat), if they are not eaten first by Willow.  Moths tend to be dispatched by Paris.  Murphy ignores the indoor wildlife, but goes crazy outside if he sees ducks on the ground or catches a whiff of a rabbit or fox.

It’s a constant job, keeping some distinction between the inside and outside of the house.  Sometimes it seems less crowded and more peaceful on the outside.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

To receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan [dot] spijer [at] gmail [dot] com>

The Quest for Justice

This is above all a thoughtful work.  The author assumes the reader to be intelligent and he treats the reader with respect.  It is not a dispassionate book – Ken Crispin’s hopes and aspirations for society are clearly stated.  He also expresses little patience with those who would impose their prejudices and bigotry on others.

The excellent introduction (22 pp) is essential reading, as it clearly summarises what the entire book is about.  It could well stand alone as an essay on the subject and, on its own, would be valuable for high school legal studies students as well as those commencing a law degree.  The introduction sets the tone for the book as well as introducing the author to us.  I wish more authors of non-fiction would go to this trouble to take the reader by the hand and say, “This is what I am going to write about and these are some of the conclusions I will come to and here are some of the arguments.”

Ken Crispin has been a barrister and a judge, rising to the pinnacle in the latter career as president of the Court of Appeal in the ACT (Australian Capital Territory).  On the evidence of this book, he would have been a fair and compassionate judge, with a keen sense of history and the role of the law in a civilised society.  He would also have experienced the frustration of having to pass judgement on the basis of laws he did not agree with.

I need to declare that I was trained as a lawyer and spent much of my time in practice working with and for people who were considered and who considered themselves as being the victims of inequalities in society and of unfair laws.  I bring that background and my tendency to become angry at injustice to the reading of this book.

Although the five chapters build on each other, each can be read on its own, as each clearly discusses the issues, gives historical background, gives arguments for and against propositions and makes it clear where the author stands.  Thus, in the first chapter – ‘The Law: does it reflect our values?’ – Ken Crispin sets out some of the origins of our current (Australian) legal system and laws, and tussles with the issue of whether our laws should reflect a moral position or simply set rules to try and keep citizens safe from harm and from interference in their pursuits.  He asks questions about the nature of rights and to what extent the State should be allowed to curtail those rights and their expression.  There is also the question of whether laws should simply express the wishes of the majority, or take account of the needs and aspirations of minorities.

Ken Crispin is critical of the tendency for politicians to make ever more laws in order to be seen to be doing something in response to those who clamour for something to be done about it.  He mentions some of the ludicrous outcomes of this and points out that often the existing laws are more than adequate to deal with new situations.  He also clearly tackles the huge disparities between people’s perceptions and realities in such areas as how much crime involves violence and how many people, once charged with an offence, are subsequently acquitted.

In Chapter 2 – ‘Our system of Justice: is it just or just adversarial?’ – the author continues his analysis of the working of the Courts as instruments of our society.  While admitting that the adversarial system is not perfect, he is of the opinion that it works well as a test of the available evidence.  He enjoys pointing out how much better it is than trial by combat or trial by water (if you float you are guilty, if you sink you are innocent).  In this chapter, Ken Crispin discusses issues of the nature of truth, legal ethics, problems of evidence and the costs to society and individuals (financial and emotional) in getting it right.  He argues that there need to be some compromises, because the cost of pursuing absolute truth (even if it were possible) would be prohibitively expensive.

He spends a substantial part of this chapter examining issues around prejudice (and pre-judging) and perceptions (often formed by inaccurate or lazy journalism) that too many people who are guilty of a crime are getting off on technicalities.  This theme of bad reporting, allied with cynical political ambitions, comes up again and again in the book.  People’s perceptions, when surveyed, have little resemblance to the actual situation: in the state of the law and its ability to cover possible criminal activity; in the amount of violence perpetrated against people; in the rate of convictions; in the severity of sentences; and in the costs to individuals and society of taking away from judges the discretion to deal with each case in the best way, taking all known factors into account.

Issues relating to sentencing are dealt with very clearly in the third chapter – ‘Sentencing: have we lost our way?’  Again, much of the blame for people’s misconceptions is laid at the feet of the media and over-zealous politicians.  The author deals clearly with even the most difficult questions, including capital punishment, preventative detention and sentencing people with mental illness.  He is open about where his own preferences lie.  He is against mandatory sentencing and against capital punishment; the former because it precludes judges from making just decisions in the light of the evidence in and the circumstances of individual cases and the latter as being hypocritical (the idea that killing someone teaches people not to kill) and fraught with error (the number of condemned people subsequently found to have been wrongly convicted).

The real value of this book lies in the fourth and fifth chapters – ‘The War on Drugs: are our strategies sound?’ and ‘The War on Terror: or a surrender of rights?’  In these Ken Crispin launches into a critical appraisal of what is wrong with our approach to both.  The first three chapters are important, in that they give us an insight into how the author thinks about the role of the law, justice, the media and law-makers, as well as giving essential context and information about the history and workings of our legal system, with comparisons to the USA and the UK.

The main thrust of Ken Crispin’s writing about the use and abuse of drugs, is that personal use should be treated as a social issue, and a medical one when use leads to harm, as is the case in a growing number of countries.  He argues that decriminalisation of personal use would take supply out of the hands of criminals and stem much of the flow of money currently going to those criminals and to the terrorist organisations they fund.  He calls for an end to the dogma that “this will send the wrong message”.  He quotes the research in other countries that shows the wisdom of decriminalisation and asks politicians to do what is right rather than what is expedient to win elections.  He argues bluntly that prohibition is not effective and he gives evidence to back up those arguments.

In the final chapter, Ken Crispin roundly condemns the governments of Australia, the USA and the UK for steadily and cynically eroding individuals’ rights in the name of preserving them.  He argues that to treat some people as falling outside the law on no more than a suspicion that they may have done something wrong plays into the very hands of the terrorists who would undermine the way of life we enjoy in our ‘free’ societies.  After all, these countries hold themselves up as bastions of human rights and the rule of law and, at least in the case of the USA, would impose these attitudes on other countries.  As the author points out, this is the height of hypocrisy and completely counter-productive.  He also condemns any use of torture, as well as incarceration without an independent and fair trial.

Ken Crispin warns us, in very strong language, to be very careful if we do not want to lose those rights and freedoms we have come to expect and for which so many people have struggled and fought for hundreds of years in order to drag us out of the Dark Ages.  He hopes, as do I, that it is not too late to reverse this trend of erosion of rights and freedoms in the name of protecting our way of life.  As he points out, it is in situations where that way of life is being threatened that we need to staunchly hold on to our nerve and apply our civilised principles fairly and honestly.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

[to receive an email each time a new review is posted, email me: <daan [dot] spijer [at] gmail [dot] com>]

Breastfeeding welcomed here.  A simple, small sticker on the door of a café, letting mothers know that they are not going to be harassed if they show a bit of flesh.  Across the road, at another café, four young women are sitting around a table in intimate discussion.  They are leaning forward, their breasts almost falling out of their tops.  And, by the way, breastfeeding is not welcome in this café.

This is all very confusing for a clear-thinker.  Why is it even necessary for a café to announce that mothers may feed their infants here, naturally?  They should naturally be able to feed them anywhere.

As a society, we tolerate the public display of naked and almost naked breasts on television and on magazine covers, at gala events and in newspapers.  What is it about breastfeeding that has people protest?  Could it be that a breastfeeding mother is presumably in a committed relationship and, therefore, her breasts are not available to the men who might get a glimpse of them?  Could it be that we have been convinced that bottle-feeding is better, cleaner and more convenient and that, therefore, breastfeeding is weird?  Are we in the thrall of businesses that make a buck out of replacing breast milk with a formula?

We could be excused for coming to such a conclusion, as we see business pitted against common sense in medicine, power generation, farming and food production, and many other aspects of our lives.  We seem to be circumscribed by what is best for businesses.  If money can be made by controlling an activity or an aspect of life, then it more easily receives support from legislators and regulators.

In Australia, many medicines are made available at heavily discounted prices through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), a part of Medicare Australia.  This costs the taxpayer billions of dollars each year.  Most medicines available through the PBS are patented drugs.  Doctors can allow ‘generic’ drugs to be dispensed – drugs on which patents have lapsed – but relatively few do.  Very few preparations of ‘natural’ substances receive PBS subsidy, even though doing so could save taxpayers millions of dollars.  However, they would make less money for the pharmaceutical industry.  On the other hand, they are often more effective and they would kill fewer people – people who die from known and statistically expected side effects when taking prescribed pharmaceutical medicines as directed.

There are so many ways that we harm ourselves by believing that we can do better than the nature of which we are a part; and, like many people with gambling problems, we convince ourselves that a solution or breakthrough (the jackpot) is just around the corner, if we could try that little bit harder and persevere just a little longer.  We have been doing this for over forty years in the ‘war’ against cancer and we are no closer to a ‘victory’, yet ever more people are employed in this endeavour.  Cancer has become an industry within the general disease industry and it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

We display the same infantile faith in our future ability to sequester CO₂ in the ground or to develop ‘clean coal’, in order that we can continue doing what we know to be wrong.  It reminds me of me as a child, trusting that my misdemeanours wouldn’t be discovered, yet at some level hoping that they would, because that would have been a relief.  Oh for that relief.

By law, corporations have an obligation to maximise the return to shareholders, but this needs to be (and is) tempered with regulation of behaviour.  Unfortunately, the regulating bodies seem to be progressively losing their teeth or less willing to bite, or both.  This is partly due to the increasing tendency to appoint to these regulating bodies ‘experts’ who were once (often very recently) employed by the companies which are subject to the regulation.  When all this is married with ex-politicians (including ex-ministers) and ex-public servants moving into ‘advisory’ positions in industry, we have a situation where regulation and ethical behaviour can easily disappear.

I know, from personal experience, that separating knowledge gained in one job from the needs of a new job can be extremely difficult, which is why it is common to prohibit senior ex-employees from moving to a competitor in less than a certain number of years.  It should also be illegal for someone who has held a senior position in government to move into an advisory role in business before some years have elapsed.  It is impossible to forget things one has been privy to and only a period of ‘cooling down’ will make enough of that privileged knowledge irrelevant.

As for breastfeeding … I recently overheard two suited men complaining about a crying baby in a café, before they both commenced separate, loud conversations on their mobile phones.  The baby was soon quieted by the offer of a breast, but seemed a little disturbed by the loud, almost argumentative voices of the two businessmen.  They, in turn, complained to a waitress that the breastfeeding mother was distracting them from their meeting.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

To receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan [dot] spijer [at] gmail [dot] com>