My mom was making lunch when she heard a thump come from the bedroom. She ran upstairs and found my dad face down on the carpet, blood seeping from a gash under his eye. For days, he had been feeling lightheaded and fatigued since receiving a round of chemotherapy at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He was sitting on the edge of the bed when suddenly, he told my mom, everything went black. Thump.

As my mom struggled to lift him from the ground, he vowed that he was done - done with Western doctors, who he said were "crooks" and "quacks"; done with "poisons" coursing through his body; done with sickening treatments he didn't believe in. "I'm going to die if I keep doing this," he told her.

That evening, with a bruised eye and a stiff neck, my dad decided to book a flight from New Jersey to Arizona so he could check out a clinic he had found on the internet. On its website at the time, the clinic, Envita Medical Centers, said that its unique protocol had helped patients "outperform other renowned cancer centers for nearly two decades." Its "proprietary" chemotherapy treatment was "so gentle," it said, "that many patients report being able to hike and exercise" during care. My dad believed this outpatient clinic - which cost nearly $10,000 a week - could save him from the Stage 4 lung cancer ravaging his body.

In many ways, this was a predictable development. Long before the cancer, my father, Rajeev, who was 63, avoided conventional medicine with an intensity that bordered on phobia. He loathed the sterile waiting rooms, the detached doctors, the pricey medications. A sharp and successful entrepreneur, he created a small business that helped doctors submit insurance claims - an experience that he often said gave him an unfiltered look at the medical industry.

The modern medical system reminded him of all he learned to fear from his own father, an Indian homeopath, who worked at an alternative-medicine practice in Midtown Manhattan. Patients traveled from across the country to see my grandfather after finding him through televised interviews and a lecture series, where he disseminated his views that vaccines are dangerous and American children overmedicated. He also taught his audience about the healing power of homeopathy, an unproven alternative medical practice developed in the late 1700s.

While I always found my father's fixation against modern medicine to be extreme, it was hard not to see things from his perspective as all the little indignities added up in the early days of his diagnosis. A brusque surgeon. A nurse who never looked up from her computer. Hours wasted in waiting rooms, treatment plans with no end in sight.

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