Starchild Abraham Cherrix said no. No stabbing. No poisoning. No burning. Enough.

But for refusing what amounts to Geneva Convention-levels of torture, Abraham, a 15-year-old with Hodgkin’s disease who lives on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, may be yanked from his family.

They’ve been accused of parental neglect for allowing him to pursue alternative cancer treatments at a Mexican clinic instead of returning to the hell that is chemotherapy.

For backing their son’s refusal to submit to high doses of chemo and radiation, Jay and Rose Cherrix have paid a steep price: the temporary loss of full custody of their son, which they’re now forced to share with the local Department of Social Services. That joint custody may become no custody.

Where to begin in this twisted case? First, it’s strange indeed when the Cherrixes, who run Wildlife Expeditions, a small-but-bustling paddling business on Chincoteague Island, are put in the same league as parental deadbeats. They shut down their company last August, their busiest month, so that Jay could be at Abraham’s side in a Norfolk, Va. – a two-hour drive from their home – during his surgery and on his chemo days for 12 weeks. Not exactly uninvolved slackers.

It makes you wonder if Social Services doesn’t have enough to do. Or what kind of world we live in when judges can establish standards of medical treatment and oblige patients to follow them.

But alternative medicine isn’t so alternative anymore. A government-funded study in 2004 found that 36 percent of Americans had used some form of alternative healing. Some surely did so because they want the life they have left – even if it’s just days and weeks – to be quality time.

Back in 2001, when my mother was diagnosed with cancer and given four to six months to live, she was a docile patient, doing everything the oncologists ordered. But she realized something was wrong when she was so sick from the “cure,” or at least the treatment, that she wanted to die anyway.

After the first chemo round, she stopped. My imminently practical and decidedly traditional mother began acupuncture and saw a Chinese medicine practitioner. For a dying woman, she enjoyed – in all senses of the word – an extra year of life. Whether because of the treatment or because the prognosis was wrong – and there goes the myth of medical omniscience – we’ll never know.

Even though Hodgkin’s can have an 80 percent cure rate with conventional treatments if it’s caught in time, I can’t blame Abraham. Yes, I know some medical clinics in other countries are little more than snake-oil factories. Then again, some aren’t.

The Cherrixes’ decision is a far cry from the parents who refuse to vaccinate their children – cancer isn’t contagious, after all – or choose to pray over a rupturing appendix rather than having it removed.

The cure for appendicitis is taking the appendix out. But no one knows if Abraham’s chemo and radiation will be a cure or merely a treatment. Or if he’ll even survive. Meanwhile, he’ll endure months of debilitating illness waiting to find out.

Abraham has already tried it the doctors’ and the social workers’ way. He’s already endured the two-hour drives to the hospital for chemo, the trips to local doctors for shots to counter the drug-induced fever, the trips back to the doctor for another if they didn’t. The return journeys to Norfolk for more chemo. And so on.

“I pray that God will give (our detractors) understanding,” Rose Cherrix told me. “It’s heartbreaking enough knowing your child has this kind of disease. For people who argue that (we’re not doing enough), they just don’t understand.”

The last thing this young man needs right now is to be dragged into a court battle. Or to be taken away from a supportive and loving family.

Abraham Cherrix and his parents have been through enough. Can the government please leave them alone?