(with files from Connie Walker, CBC)
An 11-year-old Objibwa indigenous girl from the New Credit First nation near Caledonia, Ontario has died of a stroke according to a statement by her family.
The young girl was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in March 2014. Doctors at McMaster Children’s Hospital gave her a 75 percent chance of survival when they began chemo treatment. However after 11 weeks, she experienced severe side-effects and was put in intersive care.
There she said she had a vision of Jesus, and said she wanted off the treatment. Her family said they would pursue “traditional” and alternative treatment.
Doctors said she suffered a relapse adding that there on no known cases oa anyone surviving ALL without chemo treatment. The hospital appealed to the Ontario Children’s Aid Society, seeking to have the child removed from her parents in order to continue treatment. The society investigated but said the child was not in need of protection and would not force her to return for chemo treatment.
The girl had continued alternative treatment at the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida. A CBC investigation showed it was licenced as a “massage establishment” and that former employees were suing the owner for operating a scam and practicing medicine without a licence.
In the statement announcing the girl’s death, the parents say she was recovering, “fighting toward holistic well-being” but added the claim that “chemotherapy did irreversible damage to her heart and major organs. This was the cause of the stroke”.
The death of Makayla Sault comes only a few months after an Ontario judge ruled in the case of another young aboriginal girl also diagnosed with ALL and who has also refused chemo treatments.
Doctors at the McMaster hospital judged her chance of recovery at 90 to 95 percent.
However, that 11-year-old girl has also travelled to that Florida establishment after another legal decision by an Ontario judge rejecting the hospitals efforts to get the Children’s Aid Society to intervene in this case as well.
CBC attempt to interview owner of Florida establishment.
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