The hearing at the Vicenza Assize Court opened this morning, but was later adjourned. The defendants are Luigi Gianello and Martina Binotto, the two parents accused of intentional homicide by the Vicenza prosecutor's office for delaying cancer treatment for their teenage son, who later died at San Bortolo Hospital . The parents sought the help of a doctor from Padua who practiced the so-called "Hamer method," a German doctor who invented an "alternative therapy" for cancer treatment based on unproven "psychological conflicts." The oncology treatments were thus suspended.

The hearing was adjourned until January after the Court upheld the defense's objection regarding an incorrect notification during the preliminary hearing against the mother. There will therefore be a new preliminary hearing before the preliminary hearing judge for the woman alone, to then consolidate her case with that of her husband.

The case dates back to 2024, after Francesco's death at the San Bortolo Hospital in Vicenza. A report had already been received by the municipal social services, but the teenager's condition was already critical. After discovering their 14-year-old son had an oncological condition—an osteosarcoma of the femur—the parents, having followed the standard treatment recommended by their doctors, turned to a doctor in Padua who followed the pseudo-Hamer therapy. The young man eventually deteriorated, however, and after several visits to various hospitals, including one in Perugia, he arrived in Vicenza, where he later died early last year. The Vicenza prosecutor's office, led by Public Prosecutor Paolo Fietta, had meanwhile already compiled a dossier on the case and launched an investigation.

" We never acted with the intention of harming our son. The pain and suffering endured by us and by his brother Filippo, who was deprived of his mother for 10 months, are unbearable." Luigi Gianello said this in an interview with Corriere della Sera. After retracing the ordeal of his son, who was diagnosed with cancer in December 2022 at the Rizzoli Institute in Bologna, the man recalls being dissuaded from having a biopsy by the doctor from Padua. According to him, his son was "going through a situation he couldn't bear. And we think about the fact that he was left out of the soccer team, the clash with a teacher, and me, who am demanding in school. He also blamed me." In Bologna, however, "we didn't get the psychological help we needed."

After treatment with clay and anti-inflammatories, a sort of "physical strengthening" followed at a center in Tuscany, but the situation worsened, and after belated chemotherapy, he died. The father's message was: "Go to the hospitals. You can also treat Hamer, but in hospitals. Don't rely exclusively on him." The mother, however, urged them to "stay away from Hamer. And if you want to do something, don't do it for your children, do it for yourself, not for others. You can't give advice like that, absolutely not."

(Unioneonline)

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