Book Review: Sarah’s Last Wish – A Chilling Glimpse Into Forced Medicine
Author: Eve Hillary, BHSc. G.C.Linguistics
Publisher: Self-published
Book Publication: 2010
The Australian environmental health activist, Eve Hillary, has written a book that’s become a bestseller in her country and, thereby, started a process of reform and awareness in Australia about the abomination of forced medical care and the human right to freedom of choice. This book is so well written and so exhaustively documented – both legally and scientifically – that it’s hard to put down. It is also such a terrible a story that I kept wishing it was not true. But it is.
Eleven-year-old Sarah suddenly developed a painful lump in 2002 which was misdiagnosed as an ectopic (ovarian) pregnancy, even though she was pre-pubertal. It turned out to be a rare form of ovarian cancer – and it became of great “scientific” interest to the oncological community there. Even though an ectopic pregnancy is a serious medical emergency, Sarah was first put through extreme humiliation to “prove” she had not had sex.
The lump continued to cause her incredible pain, and eventually the cancer was diagnosed and treated with surgery and aggressive chemotherapy – against her clearly expressed and legally supported wishes. (Sarah, after being told she had ovarian cancer, refused chemotherapy. So the state took custody away from the parents (by court order) and forced the child to take the chemotherapy treatments for almost two years.)
Sarah and her parents sought relief for her improperly treated pain with the author, Eve Hillary, who runs an integrative medical clinic, and so Hillary too came under attack from the Australian authorities and suffered severe financial and personal losses as a consequence.
Sarah’s case was taken all the way to the Supreme Court of Australia by the Australian Department of Community Services in order to get the power to enforce conventional treatment against Sarah’s will. Sarah’s family lost the case, and so the chemotherapy continued. Subsequent investigations revealed that the oncologists and childcare services had withheld evidence in court, falsified information, lied under oath, and the process nearly bankrupted Sarah’s parents because even their own lawyer was not willing to stand up to the juggernaut of the state and the medical community combined.
When Sarah lay dying in 2004, she made her father promise that he would do everything he could to ensure that no other kid would have to endure what she had suffered. Hence the book’s title.
Is this story a freakish exception? Not at all. Freedom of choice in healthcare has become one of the most important human rights issues of our time. Modern medicine is fueled by an engine designed to churn out ever higher profits in the wake of dazzling research with ludicrous claims, while patients are more often than not merely the fuel for that engine. In cancer therapy especially, the cut-burn-poison paradigm is still the central dogma. As such, it does not serve living people but a profitable ideology. Children with cancer could find themselves in the “care” of the state just as easily here as in Australia if parents don’t toe the line of the oncological cabal.
While reading this horrific story, I realized how lucky my husband and I were in escaping such an experience in the 1980s. We had adopted a girl who had a rare form of aplastic anemia, a condition in which production of both red and white blood cells break down completely and the patient requires transfusions every 3-4 weeks. She had acquired this condition as a result of sustained DDT exposure in India as an infant, and was brought to our attention when her parents relinquished her to an orphanage, being unable to care for her by the time she was 4 years old and in need of monthly transfusions.
The hematologist at Sick Children’s Hospital committed us to making our daughter available for research – alive and dead. She surprised everyone because she lived to be almost 16 years old, even though the maximum life expectancy for such cases is 12 years. I believe she lived longer and relatively well because of the enormous daily amounts of vitamin C she received, after I read Linus Pauling, and because of a junk-free diet. Ultimately, we did not have to honour our contract with the hematologist because he died a year before she did – of leukemia, most likely caused by the toxic drugs that his work required him to handle. Our daughter’s pediatrician went along with her every wish to the end, including her final refusal to have blood transfusions and die in peace, once she knew her liver had begun to fail.
Why put yourself through reading this terrible book? First, because Sarah wants to speak to you. Second, because such wrongdoing must be made public in order to shed light on a corrupt system that chooses profit over positive patient outcomes. Third, because we must unite in regaining our right to treat our illnesses and sustain our health according to our own understanding. To achieve this right it is vitally important that we help ourselves and others to lose whatever illusions we may still have about the infallibility of our modern medical system, and use our collective voices to bring the humanity back to healthcare.
