Cancer case prompts natural health concerns

7/03/2010

Doctors are calling for regulations on unregistered alternative practitioners after a skin cancer treated by a natural health consultant grew to invade a patient's skull.

The case has cost the health system tens of thousands of dollars and left the woman with a poor prognosis.

Yvonne Maine believed she was being treated for a benign cyst but it turned out to be a highly invasive malignant cancer. The skin cancer is so invasive that the Feilding woman's skull has rotted away.

The squamous cell carcinoma has gone through the bone, with the brain just underneath.

Maine knows she's lucky to still be alive and says now she just lives "one day at a time".

But it is unclear just how long that will be and the prospect of cure is very small.

Maine went to see her iridologist and natural health consultant, Ruth Nelson, for help with a three centimetre cyst on her head two years ago.

Nelson dressed, treated and prescribed pills for the wound every day for the next year. But Maine's daughter Carla says when the growth spread rapidly and pain set in she insisted her mum see a doctor.

Maine point blank refused - repeatedly.

Carla says she had screaming arguments with her mother and literally tried to physically bundle her into the car.

"It got to the stage I was too frightened to go to the doctor," says Maine.

ONE News called to see Nelson at her Te Horo practice but she wasn't in. When contacted by phone to discuss the case, Nelson said Maine called the shots.

"I said I'm not an expert - a number of times I said to her I'm not an expert on this," Nelson told ONE News.

Nelson acknowledged that she was practising outside her scope. "Oh yeah, definitely, outside anybody's scope in the end but I had no choice because I was begged to do it," she said.

Carla finally got her mum to hospital last June and in a challenging six hour procedure surgeons used two of her ribs to create a new skull. She then faced six months of radiation therapy.

The trauma could have been avoided if doctors had seen Maine months earlier.

Hutt Hospital's director of surgery, Swee Tan, says Nelson should have recognised she was out of her depth and referred Maine to an appropriate health practitioner.

"I think that's what you'd expect anyone who is looking after anybody, to seek help when things got out of control," says Tan.

But there are no regulations in New Zealand directing how most natural practitioners should operate.

"We should come up with something better than what we've got, because what we've got now is not good," says Tan.

Nelson is adamant she's not to blame. "I thought it was up to the family to do something about it," she says.

And Maine now admits she should have listened to her family.

"I am angry with myself, definitely angry with myself."

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