"Tyranny in a Lab Coat": TODAY, North Carolina CPS Visits 8-Year Old Judah Boyce's Home as Doctors at St. Jude's Saw He "Did Too Well" after Standard Chemotherapy + Functional Medicine Therapy
Parents Shelly & Shawn added Treatments: Hyperbaric Oxygen, Scalar-light Exposure, Red-light, Cold-laser Treatments, Acupressure, and Targeted Nutritional Supplementation, Per Functional Medicine
Yesterday, Dr. Joseph Sansome and I discussed this case which started at Duke Children’s Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, which is outrageous in the extreme. TODAY, CPS visited the North Carolina home of the Boyce’s, after a CPS Complaint was filed last Friday. Stay tuned for my interview on this tomorrow, and thank you for familiarizing yourself with this story.
It is so outlandish and outside our usual thinking that it almost doesn’t even make sense, as if it can’t possibly be true. You will feel the cognitive dissonance fighting back at you. But…
Listen to this Mom, Shelly Boyce, who previously agreed she was under threat of the medical kidnapping of her 8-year-old son, Judah, because he was “too healthy” after a standard chemotherapy protocol for Acute Lymphyblastic Leukemia (ALL) with mercaptopurine (MP) and methotrexate (MTX).
Recent blood work was better than their usual patients on the Absolute Neutrophil Count (ANC, white blood cells), so doctors suspected the parents weren’t giving their son the chemo or that some other problem was getting in the way of their plan.
A special thank you to Maureen Steele for coining the brilliant phrase, “Tyranny in a Lab Coat”.
What does that mean?
First, let’s look at white blood cells and then the Absolute Neutrophil Count (ANC).
Blood and White Blood Cells
To understand the ANC, the blood has different types of liquid and cells. We can see red blood cells, platelets, and white blood cells under a microscope. Plasma is what they float in.
4 Components of Blood
Plasma: liquid contains water, salts, enzymes, and factors.
Red blood cells (RBCs): contain hemoglobin, which carries oxygen to the cells.
Platelets: cause blood clotting, especially after injury.
White blood cells (WBCs): fight infection. A high white blood cell count or leukocytosis, occurs with infections. A low WBC count or leukopenia, occurs with AIDs or after chemotherapy, and can be life-threatening because the body cannot fight an infection. This is what St. Jude’s is used to seeing.
There are 5 subsets of WBCs:
We look under the microscope to identify 5 subsets of white cells, as seen below:
The Complete Blood Count (CBC)
We order a CBC, Complete Blood Count, to determine the different types of blood cells, as above. That’s all you get. But if we also order a CBC “with Differential”, we get not only the total white blood cell count, but a breakdown in %, of each of the 5 and a further breakdown of the early cells coming out of the bone marrow.
Here are the different types of White Blood Cells, WBCs, and what they do, with the neutrophils being of primary concern after chemo:
Here is an example of a CBC with Differential:
You see the Differential in the bottom half; it gives us a ratio of each different type.
Oncologists further calculate the ANC, or Absolute Neutrophil Count:
Absolute Neutrophil Count (ANC)
The ANC is used in oncology patients,and describes a percentage of the total WBC as neutrophils or early neutrophils knowns as “bands”.
Here is a MDCalc, a website that calculates it for you after you enter the % neutrophils and % bands, along with the total WBC count:
ANC is calculated as [10 times the WBC count in 1000s] X (% PMNs + % bands).
Neutropenia, per St. Jude’s
Here is St. Jude’s definition of different categories of neutropenia, a low neutrophl count:
The usual treatment of neutropenia, according to St. Jude’s website:
Treatment of neutropenia
The treatment for neutropenia depends on the cause or if neutropenia is a result of an underlying health condition.
Your care team may prescribe antibiotics to help prevent infection.
If your child’s ANC is too low, your care team may decide to delay chemotherapy or other treatments until their counts improve. In some cases, your child may have to be hospitalized. Each hospital has its own guidelines for patients with low ANCs.
Their management strategy, according to St. Jude’s same website:
How to manage neutropenia
If your child has neutropenia, they are at risk for infections, particularly bacterial and fungal infections. Even minor infections can become serious when the ANC is low.
It is important to take steps to help prevent infection: wash hands often, limit exposure to germs, and get the vaccines recommended by your care team.
The activities your child can do may depend on their neutrophil counts. When counts are low, your child may have to take extra precautions, such as avoiding public places, staying home from school, and wearing a face mask.
Talk to your care team about your child’s risk of infection, signs to watch for, and when to seek medical care.
See References for St. Jude’s handout on neutropenia.
CPS Complaint Filed, Now CPS Visits the Boyce Home
Shelly and Shawn had hired a private nurse to administer the MP and MTX, plus took videos of Judah’s taking his chemo as prescribed.
Judah’s lab work still looked good after increasing chemo dosing (See attorney letter, below); that seemed to trigger the CPS complaint, filed last Friday, October 17, 2025.
Today, CPS visited their home and I have permission to share that with you in order that you join me in prayer for this beautiful, caring family.
The Tweet
The Video
The Transcript
Dr. Joseph Sansone:
“… You are under threat of… basically, kidnapping, by Child Protective Services, because your son is too healthy.”
Mom:
“That’s right. He’s doing amazing. And we’re sitting in our home today, terrified every time we hear a car in the driveway and it turns out to be just an Amazon truck. Every time the phone rings, we don’t know what’s going to happen next! And then we live day-to-day… we have jobs, we have a nonprofit, we run.. we have farm animals to take care of… we have our kids!”
“They need us! And our heads are just like,… and just sitting here, nauseous. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. And it’s all preventable if they would just have a conversation.”
The Full Video and Substack Article by Dr. Joseph Sansone:
WHAT HAPPENED TO GET TO THIS POINT?
The Press Release
American Made Action: Letter of Appeal
Emphases are mine.
The Boy Who Was Too Healthy
By Maureen Steele | American-Made Action
When Shelly Boyce walks through her home in Charlotte, the walls are lined with children’s laughter. There are four of them — barefoot, curious, full of life. Judah, the second is eight years old. He likes dinosaurs and building things. He used to play outside more, before the chemo started. These days he gets tired easily. But he’s alive. And until recently, that was supposed to be the miracle.
At Novant Health Hemby Children’s Hospital, an affiliate of St. Jude’s, Judah was nearing the end of his treatment for cancer — five months away from the finish line. He’d done better than anyone expected. His bloodwork was strong. His organs were healthy. His mother says it was because she refused to let the medicine destroy him completely. She used nutrition and detoxification to help his small body endure what medicine called “cure.”
Shelly and Shawn Boyce aren’t miracle-chasers; they’re working parents trying to keep all four of their children — Emilia, Judah, Luca, and Micah — safe and whole. Guided by a licensed functional-medicine specialist, they added supportive, non-toxic therapies to Judah’s standard protocol: hyperbaric-oxygen sessions (HBOT), scalar-light exposure, red-light and cold-laser treatments, acupressure, and targeted nutritional supplementation.
Insurance covered none of it. During frontline chemotherapy, those sessions cost roughly $5 000 per month, dropping to about $1 000 during maintenance, an enormous stretch for two middle-class parents working full-time. Yet they believe these measures helped Judah tolerate the chemo and stay out of inpatient care, while many children around him were hospitalized with complications. Their reward for that devotion was suspicion — and a CPS report.
Evidently St. Jude Hospitals don’t celebrate outliers. They investigate them.
When Judah’s liver and kidney numbers came back exceptional, the doctors didn’t smile. They started asking questions — the wrong kind. What was she giving him? What supplements? What else was she doing that wasn’t in the protocol? Shelly answered honestly. She believed the goal was the same: to keep her son alive. But her honesty made her a suspect. In the new arithmetic of modern medicine, healing outside the formula is heresy.
Last month, Novant Children’s threatened to report Shelly and Shawn to Child Protective Services. The reason, she says, was that Judah was “too well.” Too strong, too stable, too inconvenient for the narrative that cancer always equals decline. The same hospital that uses St. Jude’s imagery of hope turned its face away from a boy whose strength contradicted its system.
Then came the letter. A cease-and-desist, filed by the family’s attorney, Adam Draper. It included that North Carolina law requires everyone (including physicians) to report suspected child abuse, those who do report it are provided broad immunity from legal redress. However, that immunity is only provided if the referral was made in good faith and not based upon information the referring person knows to be false. Draper went on to state, “Your notes indicate that your referral to CPS would be based upon your suspicion that our clients are not administering the MTX and MP as prescribed. Since you will know as a matter of fact on October 17 that they have indeed been administering the MTX and MP as prescribed, we exhort you not till then, nevertheless, refer them to CPS”. However adamant the St. Jude’s affiliate’s concerns about integrative therapies might be, reporting these superlative parents to the state for child abuse would amount to crossing a legal Rubicon.
But instead of compassion, the response was silence. The doctors informed the family they are happy to “transfer his care”. After years of chemo, countless nights spent praying beside hospital beds, and the exhaustion that only parents of sick children understand, the family was threatened with abandonment — five months before the end.
Shelly speaks softly when she says it: “They don’t want him because he’s not sick enough.” There’s no bitterness in her voice, only disbelief. Her son is proof that something outside their walls can work — that love, nutrition, prayer, and science don’t have to be enemies. But in this new era of medicine, where doctors no longer swear the Hippocratic Oath and only twenty percent still promise ‘First, do no harm,’ the institutions seem more interested in protecting systems than patients.
MY NOTE: Yes, it’s true. When I graduated USC School of Medicine in 1990, we voted to either say the original Hippocratic oath, modify it, or make up one of our own. We took the original.
But hundreds of thousands of doctors have never taken the Hippocratic oath! (Click to read my article)
A retired physician told me quietly, off the record: “Hospitals aren’t about healing anymore. They’re about liability.” It’s a sentence that keeps echoing in my mind even as I write this.
There is no fury quite like a parent’s love cornered by bureaucracy. Shelly has watched families like the Riveras lose their children to CPS under the same pretext — “medical neglect,” a phrase that now means “asking too many questions.” She used to think that only happened to other people. Now, she lives with her phone charged at all times, just in case the state comes for her son in the night.
In the quiet moments, Judah still laughs. He still plays. He doesn’t know that his doctors gave up on him because he didn’t deteriorate fast enough to justify their system. He just knows his mother is there, steady as a heartbeat, feeding him soup, holding his hand, keeping him alive in all the ways that don’t fit on a chart.
Maybe one day he’ll learn that survival isn’t always welcomed in the halls of medicine — that in a world where sickness is profitable, health can be a kind of rebellion.
Until then, he’s just a boy with five months to go, too strong to be saved, too healthy to be believed.
MY NOTE: Whereas the phone number below was used in the past, it may not be the best effort for today. Please stay tuned for more information, as this is a developing situation and there may be a better number to call. When I get the number or a more current effort, I will add it to the top of this article. If you’re receiving this by email, click on the article title to view any updates.
Stand with Judah. Call 1-704-384-1900, ask for Patient Relations and demand that Novant’s Children’s Hospital immediately retract their CPS referral and cease threatening the family with discontinuation of care.
The Boyce Family Attorney’s Letter (with Redactions for Privacy)
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“He’s Not Dying Fast Enough” by Maureen Steele
Thank you for sharing this most horrific turn of events for the Boyce family. We pray they are able to get the CPS case dropped with apology — but we aren’t holding our breath! Let’s keep one another strong, because iron sharpens iron!
WHAT I REALLY THINK
Only in America.
Doctors didn’t seem to consider that alternative therapy prevented a standard suboptimal response? Where is their EXCITEMENT that a child DID WELL DESPITE CHEMO? Couldn’t they REVISE their protocol and ADD HBOT, and more? To SAVE LIVES!
Were they mad that they didn’t get another money-making lifethreatening hospitalization out of this child? Or were they mad they didn’t get to add more Big Harma drugs to make his white count go up?
This is another case of doctors wearing white coats who turn traitor when patients get well. They don’t like it, simply because it wasn’t “their idea”. You didn’t do it “their way”. Their egos are too big. They want to be the one with all the ideas.
If you come up with your own ideas, they get offended because “they” are “in charge” of your body — or your child’s body. SO THEY FEEL, SO IT IS. To them. How/why do they get this way? It’s because…
They play God.
And they love to play Him. Only they decide who lives and who dies.
What they think: We must get that straight, or they will kill us, take away our children, and haunt our dreams. So they think: they will make our lives miserable if we don’t cave in and conform, do it their way.
Parents, be careful when bringing your child to a doctor, clinic, urgent care, or hospital. Don’t use explosive words, don’t reveal too much (they aren’t your friend), let them come up with ideas, feed their egos, plant thoughts that make them feel like it was their idea, and play the game.
Or don’t.
Count on God with all your heart. Rely on Him. Beg HIM. Get down on your knees and ASK HIM TO REVEAL HIMSELF TO YOU, AS HE HAS DONE FOR ALL THE PROPHETS, FOR ALL HIS PEOPLE, THROUGHOUT ALL TIME.
Let Us Pray
Wherever you are, can you ask for those around you to gather in prayer for the Boyce family?
Holy Father,
Again, I come before You in intercession for another child, Judah Boyce. Heal his mind, body, and soul! Calm his heart and give him the peace that surpasses all understanding!
I especially pray for the visit from CPS today, HOLY LORD GOD ALMIGHTY, that the outcome is beneficial to the family! BLESS THIS HOME! BLESS ALL THEIR EFFORTS!
Bring Your light and love into the lives and hearts of parents Shelly and Shawn! Guide and lead them to Your perfect plan, as You Will! Send them Your servants, and mend their hearts! Make everything turn out for good, because they love You! And also make what was meant for evil lead instead to THE SAVING OF MANY LIVES, HOLY GOD! I BESEECH YOU TO GIVE THEM ALL YOUR PROMISES OF HEALING, REPAIR, AND ETERNAL LIFE WITH YOU!
YOU ARE THE LORD OF MIRACLES! I TRUST ONLY IN YOU!
BLESS JUDAH’S BODY, YOUR TEMPLE OF YOUR HOLY SPIRIT!
YOUR NAME SHALL FOREVER BE EXALTED ON HIGH, AND I WILL KEEP PRAISING YOU THROUGH ALL THE DROUGHTS LIFE BRINGS! THAT IS BECAUSE MY STRENGTH IS IN YOU AND I WILL REMAIN FAITHFUL TO THE END!
I pray all this in the Name of Jesus!
Amen!
Reference
Neutropenia and the Absolute Neutrophil Count (ANC)
St. Jude’s PDF Document, Seen HERE.
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Reference: https://together.stjude.org/content/dam/together/en-us/pdfs/factsheet-fever-neutropenia.pdf
I have been a monthly donor to St. Judes for a long time, longer than I can remember.
Is there a concise story that I can send to them about this case along with my demand that they do something about it or I will end my support?
I’m sure many others who are monthly donors would also consider cutting off support if they knew what Novant was doing in the name of St. Judes!
Have a blessed day, Andy
I've always suspected St. Jude of experimenting on children...the heavy involvement of the Shriners (high level masons) and the Catholic church make me shiver and their relentless donation drives on TV with the 2 disabled kids are very troubling...and evidently each kid gets their own Shriner with their fez hat denoting the secret agenda of the Masonic lodges...YIKES!!