(RNS) A Minnesota court is mulling whether to order chemotherapy for a teenager with cancer whose parents are resisting the treatment because they believe their son is a Native American medicine man.

The parents of Daniel Hauser, who has Hodgkin’s lymphoma, believe they are being forced to choose between chemotherapy, which violates the family’s religious beliefs, and providing their son with a holistic therapy consistent with their faith.

The case comes as a mother in neighboring Wisconsin is facing charges of reckless homicide for denying treatment to her 11-year-old daughter, who died last year from diabetes, and similar charges against two sets of Oregon parents in the faith-healing deaths of their children.

Court documents supporting Colleen and Anthony Hauser of Sleepy Eye, Minn., say their 13-year-old son is considered to be a “medicine man” in the Nemenhah Band and Oklevueha Native American Church of Sanpete.

The Hausers also attend a Catholic church.

“The main tenet of the religion would be that you are to do no harm to your body,” said Philip J. Elbert, lawyer for Daniel Hauser, in an interview Wednesday (May 13). “The harm is that the chemotherapy is poison and that it attacks not only the cancer cells but the healthy cells of the body.”

Brown County Attorney James R. Olson argued in court documents that doctors have testified that the teen has a 90-percent chance of survival with the chemotherapy and radiation, and about a 5-percent chance of survival without it. He said the parents’ current treatment of their son — with vitamin and herbal supplements and a special diet –“does not relieve them of their duty to seek necessary medical care.”

An online version of the constitution of the Nemenhah organization includes its support of “natural healing methods.”

The district court in Brown County is expected to decide the case by Friday.