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Alternative Cancer Treatment Works for Billy Best

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(page 3 of 6)

Billy ran out the door and onto the street. He put on sunglasses and put the hood up on his sweatshirt and ran. He called his mother from a pay phone and told her he was all right but that he wasn't coming home--not ever--if it meant he had to go back to the hospital. Then he ran again. People looked for him at the storage locker because the word was out that the boys were hiding him there. He found another boy to stay with. He lay low.

At home, Billy's parents, Sue and Bill Best, were besieged by reporters. Billy phoned from time to time, never revealing where he was. They didn't tell him about the media circus that had pitched its tent on their lawn. They were afraid that would give Billy--such a private boy--one more reason not to come home. Finally, they promised him that if he came home, he would not have to go back to the hospital. Using money donated by a sympathetic observer, Billy flew home, almost a month after he had left on that Greyhound bus. A visit to Dana-Farber revealed that his cancer had worsened. The Bests told reporters they had promised Billy he would not have to resume chemotherapy. They said they would research alternative treatments.

People who had toughed it out on the chemo and won the battle had watched Billy's drama unfold on television and in the newspapers. They wrote to Billy, telling him to hang in there, that it's worth it. Others wrote about alternative treatments. Everyone who wrote maintained that the method they had tried had worked for them. For Sue and Bill Best, it was very confusing. They were also under a lot of pressure. When they told Dana-Farber they planned to seek alternatives and stop Billy's treatments, the hospital reported them to the state's Department of Social Services.

But the Bests knew that if they forced Billy to return to Dana-Farber he would run away again. They loved Billy, a boy they had adopted at birth. The Bests were religious and prayed for the solution to come to them. They prayed and they studied. In all the information they were sent, two possibilities kept coming up. Both originated in Canada. One of them was a tea called Essiac. The other was 714X, which promoted itself as a "nontoxic treatment for cancer and other immune deficiencies."

While the authorities investigated the possibility of putting Billy into foster care so he could resume treatment at Dana-Farber, Billy and his father went to Canada to meet with Gaston Naessens, the biologist who developed 714X, and find out about these intriguing treatments. "I was here alone," Sue recalls. "I was scared that I might be arrested. Nothing like that had ever happened to me in my life. Since then, we have heard of kids who were forced to take chemo or else the child would be removed [from the home]."

The publicity that surrounded Billy at the time seemed to dim the state's desire to get involved with Billy's case. "I think they would have looked pretty bad and they knew it," Sue says. "But if Billy hadn't run away, he might have had to stay on the chemo, and I wonder where he would be today. That stuff is poison--even the doctors tell you that."

In January 1995, Billy began a daily regimen of drinking 9 ounces of Essiac tea and injecting himself with 714X. He also began eating whole grains and organic foods. No red meat. No caffeine. Until then, hot dogs and macaroni and cheese had been his daily fare. "When Billy was diagnosed, we knew nothing about alternative medicines," Sue says. "I was never the medical kind. I wasn't much interested in things like that."