Abraham Cherrix is a 15-year-old boy with Hodgkin's disease. He's also an Internet-savvy free thinker who doesn't want to do another round of chemotherapy and radiation; what he wants to do is go to Mexico for a controversial herbal treatment he hopes will cure him.
A gravely ill Sephardic Jew came to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles from his home in Israel, hoping to find a successful treatment for his terminal cancer. The treatment did not yield the results he had hoped, but chaplain Rabbi Levi Meier visited his room with something more comforting than medicine.
Clinical trials involving gene therapy are considered to be of great enough real and potential risk that they are not attempted in children before they have been conducted with adults.
