Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry

Robert and Mangesh Hattikudur explore the birth of the "unorthodox biomedical movement", which is a fancy way of saying "fake doctors who poison children to cure Autism".

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
A media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hi, everybody, it's James here. If you don't listen to
it could happen here, you might not recognize me. My
name is James Stout and I'm the guy who pops
onto this feed every few months to tell you something
very sad and then ask for your money. And that's
why I'm here today. A terrible earthquake struck me and
Ma today the day I'm recording this, which is Friday,

(00:23):
the twenty eighth of March, it was seven point seven
on the Rigter scale. We know of more than one
hundred deaths, but it's likely the death toll is much
much much higher. Lots of the telegraph and internet infrastructure
has been taken out by the earthquake, and the Hunter
restricts internet and social media access, so we don't really
know the full extent of the death but we can

(00:45):
imagine it will be very high. As one of the
areas most affective was Mandalay, which is the second largest
city in Memmah. I've spoken to half a dozen sources
in Memma today, people who Robert and I have interviewed before.
They're all okay, but they all shared how terrible things were.
They said things were as bad as they were at
the time of Cyclonagus, which would say terrible disaster in

(01:06):
two thousand and eight. If you would like to support
the people of Burma who are currently fighting against tyrannical
dictatorship as well as dealing with the consequences of this
natural disaster, there are a couple of ways you can
do so. I was actually already running a fundraiser on
my Patreon for MOBIAPDF. They are a casualty evacuation team

(01:27):
in southern Chance State right at the fiercest part of
the fighting right now. They don't fight. What they do
is they go and they evacuate people who have been injured,
and they provide medical services to internally displace people. They've
been doing this since twenty twenty one. They're incredibly brave
people and they've saved more than three hundred lives. You
can read more about them by going to my Patreon post,

(01:49):
which also includes all the links for donation. The website
for that is TinyURL dot com slash help hyphen Meanmar.
That's TinyURL dot com slash h ELP hyphen m y
A n M A R. If you'd like to donate
somewhere else, An organization that you can donate to is
to Free Burma Ranges. Free Burma Ranges dot org. They're

(02:13):
a fantastic endio. They've been doing a lot of medical
work in the liberated zones of BMR for a very
long time. They've also worked in Java and lots of
other place around the world where people need help. I
spoke today from FPR today as well, and he told
me that they were already starting to respond to the disaster,
so to donate to them Free Burma Ranges dot org.
Thanks very much, well appreciate your support.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that
is happening right now to your ears. There's nothing you
can do about it, except for like turn off your
phone or your headset. But don't do that. Listen to
these great episodes that we have with my good friend

(02:56):
manyash Man gash Welcome to the program.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
Thank you so much for having me. Robert and Sophie,
I'm thrilled to be.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
Here's here you you used to work at the company
that we currently work at, and now you're you're independent.
You're a you're a pirate, you know, fly in your
own flag in the middle of the sea. But the
sea is podcasts.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
Yeah, I mean, I mean a jolly pirate, I hope.

Speaker 4 (03:22):
But Andy and you co host a podcast with our
boss and friend Will Pearson called part Time.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Genius Our Boss Friend.

Speaker 5 (03:34):
All right, but friend and Boss. I notice how I
ordered that, and people should listen to it. It makes me.
It's like a podcast that'll make you happy. You'll like
get to learn a thing, but it'll be fun.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
That is so sweet, it really is. It's like the
way that we used to talk in college, really nerdy
and lay into the night and just making each other laugh.
And it feels nice that we get to do that
still all these years later.

Speaker 5 (03:59):
Excellent, Well, beautiful, you're not gonna you're not gonna feel
good after we tell you, uh, what we're talking about today.

Speaker 1 (04:07):
Well, we're gonna What we're gonna talk about today is
not something that will make you feel good.

Speaker 4 (04:12):
It's gonna make you feel really bad.

Speaker 1 (04:14):
Yeah, we're gonna talk about the history of quack snake
oil cures that kill children in an attempt to cure
them of autism. Oh my gosh, I'm not laughing at that.
That's that's that's horrible, which is why we're talking about it.
But it's such a thing to.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
Be like and just like, like, have a box of
popcorn and listen to you tell me stories.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
Yeah, ten thousand words of some of the bleakest ship
you've ever heard is about to be coming your way.
Congraund No, thanks for showing up this week.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
I can't wait.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
So you know, I'm gonna start this by saying, we're
talking about like autism quote unquote cures. There's no way
to cure autism, which a thing is the thing we
now understand is like a condition. It's a way some
people are but it is treated often still as a
disease that needs to be eradicated, as if it's like
a plague. And a lot of harm comes from kind

(05:13):
of the discrepancy between the reality of the situation and
how a great deal of people see it. And this
week we're going to talk about this specifically the Grifters,
a group called the biomedical movement, which is these are
all people who are adjacent to guys like Andrew Wakefield.
They're all people who sell different kinds of we're talking
about like chellation, therapy and shit, all sorts of different

(05:34):
like treatments and cures. They call them interventions, and ultimately
the impact of all of this stuff is that it
poisons a lot of children. Oh so the inciting incident
for me working on these episodes. Maybe you heard about
this story, man gosh Is. On January thirty first, a
five year old child suffering from ADHD and sleep apnea

(05:55):
was admitted to the Oxford Center in the Detroit suburb
of Troy for treatment. Now, well, that name, the Oxford
Center sounds great, right, That sounds like a legitimate place
of medical science. Right Oxford. We all know that's a
good name, and that means something real. Has nothing to
do with the college, has nothing to do with academics
at all. It is instead a place where parents take

(06:15):
their children to have unproven medical experiments conducted on them
for profit. One of those experiments was the use of
hyperbaric therapy to treat ADHD and sleep apnea. Now it'd
be very clear hyperbaric therapy is a thing. It's a
very real medical thing, right, Like I think it got
its start in use. Basically, it's like pressure, pressurizing and

(06:36):
oxygenating like an area, a room, or in the case
of what this kid was, being put in a little
glass too. But it starts with like if people diving,
and when you're diving, particularly at like certain depths for
too long, you get like all of these gases building
up in your blood. And if you like surface, even
if you're doing it slowly, there's a certain point in
which you can't surface on your own slowly enough to

(06:59):
like have that stuff dissipate and not fuck you up.
So you go into a hyperbaric chamber and it basically purges.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
For like the bends or whatever.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Essentially this is like people who
are doing like very deep sea like when they're welding
at the bottom of like ol rigs and stuff. That's
one of the things you use this for. But they
found there's other things Hyperbaric chambers are great for actually
over over the years because it oxygen, It like forces
so much oxygen into your tissues. There are people who

(07:29):
have certain kind of like injuries that won't heal, like
people with diabetes right often can get injuries and like
their feet that don't heal. A hyperbaric chamber can like
force the healing process to start. Basically, don't they don't.

Speaker 3 (07:42):
They use it for like NFL players or like there's
some I feel there's some athletes do it.

Speaker 1 (07:46):
Right, and there's some there's some discussion that there may
be some like benefits there. That's when we get more
into the snake oil, right, because most of much of
what hyperbaric chambers use for is not the stuff where
it's proven to help. You know, Again, there's maybe some
sports medicine benefits to it, and there's stuff like if
you have radiation injuries, hyperbaric chambers can help. So there

(08:07):
are some new uses. These are actually very This is
actually a very powerful therapy for certain proven things. However,
there's no evidence that it does anything for ADHD or
sleep apnea zero, just not things that it helps with.
But there's this widespread belief that comes out of this
bio medical movement for like trying to treat and cure autism,

(08:30):
that hyperbaric chambers are useful for that. And I know,
I said, this kid has ADHD in sleep apnea. Kind
of the gist of the story that we'll be telling
is an awful lot of these same people believe ADHD
is another type of autism, which is not the mainstream
scientific concept.

Speaker 3 (08:47):
Understanding.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
But that is part of why this gets lumped in
and it gets lumped in because you can then sell
hyperbaric therapy to more people with kids. Right, So again,
hyperbaric chamber chamber is pretty cool, but they're not useful
for the problems that this five year old kid, Thomas
Cooper had, And because the Oxford Center existed to take
money from parents with kids who had autism and other

(09:10):
stuff going on, they didn't really care about scientific rigor
or even basic safety protocol. So here's the thing about
doing a therapy like this. You have essentially like one
hundred percent oxygen. Now do you remember, mangesh, what happened
to that Apollo mission that back when they were using
one hundred percent O two inside of the spacecraft.

Speaker 3 (09:33):
It doesn't seem like a smart it.

Speaker 1 (09:35):
It caught on fire on the inside and everyone died
a horrible det Now there's a way to deal with this, right,
because there's a part of the benefit of a hyperbaric
chamber when it's useful is how much oxygen there is
in there and the way that the pressure works with that.
But when you have this much oxygen, you have to
take a lot of weird precautions to make sure that

(09:56):
everyone inside the chamber doesn't get incinerated. So, among other things,
if you're in a properly run hyperbaric chamber, you are
going to be only wearing like cotton fabric, right, because
wool and polyester can cause extremely tiny sparks when it
rubs against other fabrics or whatever in such an environment,
and normally you don't notice that, but the smallest spark

(10:19):
can cause an explosive fire that instantly burns you to death.

Speaker 4 (10:22):
Right.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
The other thing that you do if you're putting someone
in this, in addition to making sure they're wearing the
right fabric, is you put a grounding thing on their wrist. Right.
If you've ever built computers out of parts, you've used
one of these, and it's to stop you from like
a static discharge from fucking up this very precious machinery
that you're putting inside of a box. We put those

(10:45):
on a person, and that also reduces the risk. Right.
None of this was done in this situation. This kid
was wearing whatever, I think he was wearing polyester, right,
and he had like a polyester blanket to nobody really
made sure, and he wasn't grounded right, And so at
one point he turned over and there was a spark
and his entire body immediately ignite it. And the hyperbaric

(11:08):
chamber he was in was a small glass tube just
big enough for a person's body, so he had no move.
There's no escaping, there's no way to get out. He
is just in a tube of glass on fire. His mom,
who's sitting nearby, there's no medical professionals nearby, breaks tries
to break with him.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
Now medical professionals, of.

Speaker 1 (11:27):
Course, not, of course, not again, this isn't a medical procedure, really,
you know, yes, yeah, So his mom is sitting nearby
and she tries to break into this contraption and suffers
third degree burns to her arms trying to save her
little boy. Her lawyer later said it's literally the worst

(11:47):
thing any parent could experience, and poor Thomas his last
moments of life were being engulfed in flames and perishing
in front of his mother. He was certainly aware of
what was going on. Oh my god, and yeah, the
kid dies and just.

Speaker 4 (11:59):
As aably horrible.

Speaker 1 (12:01):
As an aside, every time this happens, the person dies. There.
This is a one hundred percent fatality rate problem when
it's in a chamber this small. If you're in like
a much bigger chamber. There's like some ways too that
you could potentially escape. But when a fire happened, When
this kind of fire happens in this kind of condition,
people don't live right, Like, that's just that's just the
way it is.

Speaker 3 (12:23):
And so so so for these treatments, are are they
just coming like once? Is it like like.

Speaker 1 (12:29):
Not nearly as much money? People do this as many
times as you can get him to pay, oh.

Speaker 3 (12:34):
So so like, and was this the first time that
this kid had been there or had been.

Speaker 1 (12:37):
I think this was the first time for this kid,
but I'm not actually certain.

Speaker 4 (12:41):
And there's no medical professional nearby, nobody nothing.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
No, there's usually someone generally like a retired doctor. It's
kind of getting a pot prescription used to be where
like you've got some guy he's not really you know,
he used to be a fucking e n T doctor
and he doesn't do that anymore. But he like sign
some paper work, right, maybe it comes by once a week. Yeah,
You're like, you're like, because it's weed this it's not
fun when it's a the when it's to burn you

(13:06):
to death chamber.

Speaker 5 (13:08):
No, it's like, uh, you know, you go home and
google the person who gave you the prescription and go,
what fucked up thing did you?

Speaker 3 (13:14):
Yeah? What did you?

Speaker 1 (13:14):
How many people did you get killed? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (13:18):
Why do you barely have a medical license?

Speaker 1 (13:22):
Those were the days. My friend.

Speaker 4 (13:25):
Menis speeds.

Speaker 1 (13:26):
So Michigan, which is where this happens, had no rules
at the time, Michigan. Yeah, And there were absolutely no
rules about how hyperbaric chambers had to be like maintained
when you were doing stuff, like there's absolutely no standards.
The government does come in, they find out that these
the Oxford Center had old machines that were way past
the date at which they would have needed to be

(13:47):
refurbished to operate safely, and it makes matters worse. There's
like a because these are devices where people die if
they're not working properly. There is a life cycle indicator
that tells you how many times it's been used, so
you know if it has to be refurbished before further use.
And they had illegally dial back that number like you
do like a used car stealers do on a car. Yeah, yeah,

(14:11):
but on the death chamber that burns children alive.

Speaker 3 (14:14):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (14:15):
Further investigation by the authorities found per this USA Today article, quote.
The Oxford Center staff failed to meet the following safety
standards on the day of Thomas's death. Number one conduct
his daily maintenance check in pre dive safety check. Number two.
Have a medical doctor or safety supervisor at the Troy
facility at the time of Thomas's treatment. Number three. Provide
a licensed technician to perform the treatment. Number four require

(14:38):
Thomas to wear a grounding strap during his treatment. None
of this was done. Ultimately, both the facility safety director
and the CEO of the company were charged with negligence.
The CEO, Tamila Peterson, has to go down as the
most irresponsible single individual in this story. When it became
clear that this five year old had died in her center,

(15:00):
detective showed up. Because a five year old burnt to death, right,
You're gonna send some detectives in. And she immediately flees
the scene and takes her laptop to her young son
and tells him to scrub it. Great, good moment. Immediately
implicate your kid too. Excellent work, responsible parenting, We love

(15:22):
to see it. This is a helicauster parent, but in
the sense that helicopters are extremely dangerous and kill everyone
inside of him. So thankfully. Again, the youth these days
not great with computers. Her kid doesn't really know how
to scrub a laptop, and so it doesn't get scrubbed.

(15:47):
And I'm gonna quote from an article by the Detroit
Free Press here. Still, police found electronic messages on Peterson's devices,
said detective Danielle Trigger. Great name for a detective, by
the way, including an exchange in which Peterson sent photos
of the boys burning body and wrote something to the
effect of, if my leg was on fire, I would
at least try to hit it and put it out.
He just laid there and did nothing. She is roasting

(16:10):
a dying five year old hopes, Oh my god, and
lady up. Also, Danielle Trigger, that's like a that's like
an Airport mystery novel series character Dave. That can't be
a real detective.

Speaker 4 (16:27):
Saying that's Nancy.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
It is very funny. Like if you are Danielle Trigger,
you just kind of have to become a detective. Like
you try to be a beat cop and there's like no, no, no,
You're going right to murders. Take off that uniform. You
are putting on a trench coat. Peterson's messages also showed
that When she was asked whether the company was promoting

(16:51):
hyperbaric chambers to treat a rectile dysfunction, she responded, whatever
gets bodies in those chambers? Lol, according to Jesus Christ crimes.
What the fuck, lady. So this is the story that

(17:14):
got me looking into the stuff that led to the
writing of this episode. We're going to be going back
in time from this point, but I wanted to start
kind of at the end because we're going to explain
why this is a thing, right, Why there is such
an industry for quack medicine like this that promises to
deal with whatever learning disability or condition your child has
by giving them dangerous, absolutely scientifically unverifiable interventions. And if

(17:42):
I had to name the root cause of all of this,
it would be the fact that autism has, for the
most of the time that it has been in use
as a diagnostic term, been considered like a disease, right,
like an illness, and generally a life ruining one. Right.
And I need to separate here the diagnost term autism
from what we know today as autism, because they're very

(18:03):
different things. As I said, in our episodes, we did
some episodes on a guy named Bruno Bettelheim, who is
a pioneering quack in the child development in child abuse fields.
In the thirties and forties, every child who didn't behave
in accordance with the desires of adults at the time
was labeled as autistic. Now, there were other labels that
they used. The terms psychotic and schizophrenic were used interchangeably

(18:25):
with autism in diagnoses of kids who had basically any
kind of behavioral issue up until the nineteen eighties, which
is when we started to gain a better understanding of
what those terms mean.

Speaker 3 (18:34):
Until the nineteen eighties, Yeah, that's crazy.

Speaker 1 (18:38):
And like you will hear childhood like psychosis used interchangeably
with autism a bunch in the mid century. And the
actual facts of the matter is that what we now
call autism, we know actually makes you less likely to
develop schizophrenia, although we really don't know why, right, it's
just kind of like the data suggests that people who
have been diagnosed with autism have lower rates of schizophrenia

(19:00):
than kind of the general population. But it shows how
off base people were about the basics of this stuff
for a very long time. And you could view the
change that occurred in the nineteen eighties as broadly positive,
which is autism stops being seen as you know, basically
childhood psychosis, and starts being seen as a disorder of development.
So it's no longer being treated as a psychiatric illness,

(19:23):
which means the parents of these kids start to deal
with a lot less stigma. And the fact that there
was stigma to begin with does go back to our
friend Bruno Bettelheim, who had argued that quote unquote, refrigerator moms,
cold mothers caused autism, Like if your mom isn't nice
enough to you, that's how you get autism. Not the truth.

(19:43):
But this also goes back deeper to Sigmund and Anna Freud,
who had positive view of mental illness that often blamed
the actions of the parents from most problems in children.

Speaker 5 (19:53):
Right.

Speaker 1 (19:54):
In other words, they weren't seeing a lot of this
as like genetic is just kind of structural or chemical.
They were seeing this as your mom or dad fuck up,
and so you wind up with whatever illness. Right, And
so there was a deep stigma if you were a
parent with a kid who had any kind of developmental
disorder or illness, that you had done something to cause it, right,
which is obviously very bad for parents and not any

(20:16):
better for children. And one of the results of this
is that once stuff starts to change, this first generation
of parents who are starting to get closer to correct
diagnoses when their kids get diagnosed with autism also were
generally raised in a culture where parents have usually been
blamed for what happened to their kids in this way,
and that's starting to change. But they still have this

(20:38):
deeply rooted desire to prove I'm not why this happened, right,
It's a huge part of the story that we're going
to tell.

Speaker 3 (20:45):
I mean, that still must be the case. Sorry, Like,
there's so many like high performing perfectionists, like parents who
have kids who who are autistic, and like one, they
don't want to believe their kids are autistic for a
very long time, right, they don't see it in front
of them, but the but that sense that you can
fix it or cure it, like is so desperate and

(21:06):
for so many of them.

Speaker 1 (21:07):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's we're going to talk about that.
And it's also just the fact that at this point
in time, when kids get diagnosed with autism, they are
generally people. They're generally kids who they number one have
other things going on. There are different kinds of developmental
disorders and even physical disabilities that sometimes happen alongside autism.

(21:27):
It's like not necessarily a causitive effect, but like they're correlated.
And most people who we would understand today as having
autism aren't being diagnosed with it, right, because most people
who have autism are generally able to still live independent,
normal lives, but most people who are getting diagnosed with
it in these days aren't. So there's also that attitude that, like,

(21:49):
this is this is a life ruiner, right, That's how
a lot of and I'm not saying anything bad about
like people who do have more severe disorders or that
like life ruining is a good way to talk about that,
but that's how people are talking about it in this
period of time. So there's both this stigma and this
incredible fear around it, and there's also this attitude. It
started to change the idea that the parent has to

(22:11):
be to blame, but there's still this very American attitude
that someone has to be to blame, right, And all
of these different factors are the real root of the
biomedical movement that brings us in the twenty first century.
To RFK Junior and that five year old kid burning
to death in a hyperbaric tube. And you know, I
think I should also state here that increasing numbers of

(22:32):
people do not think it's responsible or good to talk
about autism as a disability or as like a disorder.
It's just kind of a way people are and I
tend to think there's a lot to that attitude. But again,
part of the issue is that a lot of the
people getting diagnosed in this period of time have other

(22:52):
stuff going on and have a lot of very severe problems.
When I was working in special ed, all of our
kids were just describing me as kids with autism, but
they were all they all had a lot of severe issues.
I'm not just and I'm talking about like a lot
of them were quadriplegics because of birth defects. A lot
of them had like a lack of oxygen to the brain.

(23:13):
And so these were kids who, I mean, we dealt
with Grandma seizures every single day. These were kids who
were often very sick and often in a lot of pain.
And that is a lot to a lot of people's
understanding of the I'm just what autism is, right, which
is not accurate. Right. One of the things that we
have learned over the years. When I was teaching, and
this is close to twenty years ago, I think the
understanding was that something like a third of people with

(23:35):
autism had average or above average IQs. And every few
years that number has leapt up to the point that
now it looks like sixty percent or more. And I'm
sure the number, I'm sure it's basically the same distribution
as the normal population. And I'm not trying to reduce
everything to IQ But again, initially, the people getting diagnosed

(23:56):
and so are understanding of what autism is is deeply
skewed by the fact that most people who have it
are just sort of like still living in like not
getting a diagnosis and going about their day. Right. The
fact of the matter is that like David Byrne and
David Lynch were never formally diagnosed with autism.

Speaker 3 (24:17):
Right, Yeah, No, I mean there's a there's an article,
like an opinions piece in the New York Times this
week from the editor of the journal Science who has
you know that he figured out he had autism at
age fifty three and was talking about how, like, you know,
it's made him so much better of a scientist and
he sees things that other people don't. But also that

(24:38):
late understanding that like he's in this field and didn't
realize that that he had autism until such a late period.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
And that's I think that's like the again increasingly the
way it seemed today and probably the right way to
look at it is that like, yeah, some people, it's
a different way of being a person. You're not like
it's not the same way everyone is, but like it's
not like an inherently like bad or deleterious thing. It's
just you're different. And so there are different ways that
you're going to interact with and view the world and

(25:06):
different things that are going to work when like we're
talking about educating people with autism, and again, our understanding
of this is still very much developing, but it's in
a very primitive state in the eighties and nineties. Right now,
people do know Asperger syndrome is a topic of discussion
by this time, and like the eighties and such, and
so there is an understanding that like some of these

(25:28):
kids are like, you know, it's this idea that like
some of them get superpowers, right, which is not really
an accurate way to view it. But like some we
do know that, like there are people with autism who
are like super like, highly intelligent and capable in specific areas.
But the general understanding, if you get this, is that
your kid is never going to live a quote unquote

(25:48):
normal life. Right, That's how people talk about it. So
if you're keeping track in the late eighties and early nineties,
you've got a couple of things coming together. You have
a generation of parents who are still used to and
traumatized by the thought of being aimed for their kid's condition,
who are also used to seeing autism depicted as a
fate worse than death. Feeding into this complex churn is
the fact that as the term autism grows to encompass

(26:09):
more people, it loses what author and doctor Michael Fitzpatrick
describes as a sense of coherence. Michael wrote a great
book about the biomedical movement titled Defeating Autism A Damaging Delusion,
and in it he writes the autistic spectrum stretched from
children who are nonverbal to severely disabled, to those who
are of high intelligence but behave strangely and had no friends.

(26:31):
The spectrum included children with Rehet syndrome, a neurodegenitive disorder
with an identified genetic cause with fairly superficial similarities to autism.
It also included children with atypical autism or in the USA,
pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, a label that merely
exposed the incoherence of the diagnostic framework. As one authority commented,

(26:51):
any classification system that includes atypical versions of one entity
as a separate diagnosable entity all its own has to
be next to useless as the base scientific progress, which
is a really good point, Like there's this thing, and
also the opposite is also the thing, Like it's like, yeah,
maybe we didn't have it right. Maybe that's not a

(27:13):
super useful term to be the describing ass. You know,
stuff like this is a moving target, and it's both
worth acknowledging, like the harm that the fact that this
is deeply incomplete and fucked up has on a lot
of kids and parents at this time, and also, well,
you were never going to get this right straight away.

(27:34):
So the confusion here is the final ingredient to what
comes next. The unorthodox biomedical movement, which is how Fitzpatrick
describes this movement that kind of terminates in that five
year old in the tube starts with parents who are
angry and shocked that their kids are as they see
it broken, and they're also angry and scared of the
thought of being blamed themselves. The clinical definition is flawed,

(27:56):
and this produces the opportunity for them to question it,
starting with rejection of the idea that autism is quote
purely genetic. Now, if you remember, guys like Bettelheim had
argued for years that autism was caused by refrigerator moms,
while science had increasingly come to the conclusion that the
roots of autism were largely genetic. Now, no one ever
argued that was the whole story. And in fact, an

(28:18):
interesting thing about autism is that identical twins. In cases
of identical twins both only have autism about ninety percent
of the time, which means there's some degree of and
when we say environment, that means something other than genetics
that's playing a role. Right. Fitzpatrick succinctly summarizes what happened next.

(28:39):
The biomedical activists emphasize environmental rather than the constitutional factors
in the causation of autism, which they insist as a biomedical,
metabolic or immune system disorder. While some activists seek to
redefine autism as a form of mercury poisoning or as
the result of some process of vaccine injury, others regard
it as primarily a gastro inter aloge disorder. To reject

(29:01):
the focus of the autism mainstream on genetic research, demanding
the redeployment of funds into the study of putative environmental factors,
and some of this is like a pride thing where
they're like, if it's genetic, that means it's my fault again,
which is like not how you should look at that,
but people do too often. And yeah, so we're going

(29:23):
to be focusing on like the bastards and the quack
experts kind of at the core of this movement, but
we're also going to talk about a lot of these activists.
I don't want to act like that's the only division
happening here, though from the flawed state of affairs in
the early nineteen nineties, you also have like, that's not
the only thing happening within kind of the community of
people with autism. In the early nineteen nineties, you start

(29:43):
to have the first neurodiversity activists, and these are people
like Jim Sinclaire, who was a man with autism who
wrote in nineteen ninety three this kind of very beautiful
piece in which he talked about, like, I understand why
parents might mourn not having the child they had expect
to have. But then he went on to write, quote,
we need and deserve families who can see us and

(30:05):
value us for ourselves, not families whose vision of us
is obscured by the ghosts of children who never lived.
Grieve if you must, for your own lost dreams, but
don't mourn for us. We are alive, we are real,
and we're here waiting for you. And I yeah, we're
not going to talk about that side of the story enough.
Because this is a podcast about bad people. I thought

(30:27):
it would be an error not to include that.

Speaker 3 (30:30):
Really beautiful actually, like, yeah, you think about these parents. Obviously,
they spend so much time warning the kids that they
thought they'd have right.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
Right, and trying to fix them that they're not. Actually
they're engaging with appreciating and raising their child.

Speaker 3 (30:45):
I mean, you need like kids who don't play like
the high school jock who's like, kid doesn't play soccer
as well as he does or whatever, right, like, and
you think about the difference between you know, that expectation
versus someone severely autistic.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
It this thing that happened, and it's the So much
of the root of the modern fascist movement is like
the parental rights movement quote unquote, which is really just
people who want to have this ancient Roman understanding of
like I get to choose exactly who my kid becomes,
and no, you don't, no one ever has. That's not
how people are. Like you're gonna have a kid, you

(31:20):
really need to accept that they're just gonna do whatever.

Speaker 3 (31:27):
Your kids zero.

Speaker 1 (31:29):
You cannot make them into a specific You can if
you're generally you can make sure that like they're not
like a murderer or a horrible criminal. Like that's really
your goal is making sure they have like empathy and
like the ability to understand how to survive in the world.

Speaker 3 (31:46):
That's it. Well, you should teach them to scrub a
computer early imagine you.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
Gotta teach them to be those files. My god, come
on now, So we're not anyway, we're not gonna be
talked about the Jimsenclaires and like the neurodiversity movement nearly
enough in here, but I wanted to kind of bring
that side of it into this because it would be
irresponsible not to. Now let's get back to the cranks,

(32:12):
you know first, But first, you know it was not
a crank our sponsors. Ah, we're back boy. I love
that hyperbaric chamber. At I was thinking these things were
death traps until they said fifteen percent of where whatever
the fuck you want.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
Let's use the code yeah polyester.

Speaker 1 (32:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (32:38):
So.

Speaker 1 (32:38):
One of the first and most important organizations in this
history is the Autism Research Institute, which was founded in
nineteen sixty seven and through its long life has effectively
been a couple of different kinds of organization. But in
its early days, at the start, it was founded by
a doctor named Bernard Rimland. Rimland was a research psychologist
with a son who was diagnosed with autism back in

(33:01):
like the fifties, right when it was blamed on cold
and distant refrigerator moms. Now, Rimland is not a sympathetic
character in this story. He's a bad guy, but he
comes from a sympathetic start, which is that his son
gets diagnosed with autism, which is blamed on the mom
being cold, and he's like, that's not my wife, right,
Like this this is not on her, and he's right,

(33:23):
not on his wife. Yeah, she was a loving mother,
I'm sure. And so he comes to the very reasonable
belief that, like, well, then that's obviously this doesn't explain autism.
We're wrong about what this is. Unfortunately, he decides that
autism is caused by biomechanical issues triggered by what he

(33:44):
termed environmental assaults. And this is what this is the
core of the anti VAXX movement, right, this is the
birth of it, the very before they're really even focusing
as much on that. Just this understanding that this is
something environmental has fucked with my kid, and that's why
they've got this, right, that's where it all starts. And
Rimlin is a big anti vax guy, but that's like

(34:04):
the origin of it. Now again in this in the
initial era sixty seven, he's not being a crank for
theorizing this because we don't know anything, right, and some
of his observations are accurate. The issue is that Rimlin
continued to hold to his belief about environmental contagions long
after the evidence put light to that. In between serving

(34:25):
as the technical advisor on the nineteen eighty eight film Rainman,
he concluded that vaccines were the quote prime suspect as
the cause of autism due to the inclusion of a
mercury based preservative known as Theomersaul. So again, this is
the Rainman guy. And in nineteen ninety five, the Autism

(34:45):
Research Institute launched a program known as Defeat Autism Now
exclamation Point or just DAN with an exclamation point. That
exclamation point is critical. It's always used in there and autocorrect.
What's me to have the next word be a new sentence?
Which is very annoying for me. So Dan's goal is

(35:06):
to put together parents with physicians and researchers to collectively
explore new treatments and cures with the ultimate goal of
defeating autism, a condition that cannot be defeated, because again,
it's just the way they are. I am not going
to make that point every time this comes up, but
I do feel the need to emphasize it here at

(35:27):
the jump. So DAN is the tumor which would eventually
metastasize into our entire fantasy medicine industrial complex, which itself
is a major booster and contributor to the modern fascist movement.
You can tie the presidency of Donald Trump directly to
this organization and the things that inculcated in our society.
So the physicians who are interested in DAN were not,

(35:49):
as a rule, people in the I don't know how
else to pronounce it.

Speaker 3 (35:53):
Every time you say it, I was thinking about the
exclamation points. I'm glad you're also making the audience the comment.

Speaker 5 (35:58):
It's also going to really be a jolt for editor.

Speaker 1 (36:05):
So the physicians who were interested in DAN were not,
as a rule, people of the prime of their career,
functioning within their chief area of medical competence. A doctor
is not a doctor, right. It's one of those things.
If you've got a doctor who specializes in heart surgery,
he could be a great heart surgeon. He probably knows
how to deliver a baby, like intellectually, but he wouldn't

(36:29):
be your first choice, you know, like again, better than
a regular dude. Are you treat about doctor? I'm not
even shitting on doctor. I'm just saying, like, doctors have specialties,
right of course, because medicine is a big field. Again,
a guy who's specialty is like you're urinary tract. You
might not want like examining your eyes because he's not

(36:51):
an actometrist. Not as specialty. But with stuff like this,
they function on pot doctor rules, which is, hey, did
you age ot, are you retired, are you tired of
being like a family practitioner or whatever? Come into this field.
Say you're an autism expert. Now you'll get called a
hero for prescribing anything, and you can keep getting money

(37:15):
for not actually doing any work. Right now, When young
medical professionals who have some actual relevant expertise get involved,
it's generally because they have kids who get diagnosed with autism, right,
and so some of these people are like psychotherapists, psychiatrists
and stuff like that. There are some neurologists who get
involved in this, but for the most part, it's like
older doctors who are kind of aging out of the

(37:36):
profession and looking for a grift. You know, again, we
should have kept the pot doctor system going as like
a just a way to keep these people off the streets. Right,
It's like a boys and girls club for old doctors. No, no,
let them give out pot prescriptions.

Speaker 3 (37:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:57):
So these experts are not mostly doctors though, and in fact,
among the most influential of them is former school teacher
Sue Palmer, author of the book Toxic Childhood, published in
two thousand and six, and she is one of the
first people to look at this massive surge and diagnoses
of autism ADHD in other conditions, not as evidence that
we were beginning to understand these conditions and thus correctly

(38:19):
recognized how many people had them, but that there had
been a quote special needs explosion that must have been
caused by an environmental factor. She believes it's either jug
food or video games generally, right, these different theories people have.
Palmer is one of the first experts who lumps autism
in with ADHD as well as dyspraxia, dyslexia, and several

(38:39):
other learning disorders. And again, this is why I started
with the story that kid is not diagnosed with autism,
it burns to death. He's diagnosed with ADHD. But that
is a death related to this movement that is sparked
by fear of autism, right, because they just start lumping
in with every other thing that we're now diagnosing properly
more often because they think, wow, so many more kids
have this. No, probably about the same amount have it

(39:01):
who always have. We just know what it is now,
you know. Another biomedical practitioner, Kenneth Bach lumped autism and
ADHD together with asthma and allergies and labeled them before
a disorders in both cases, what these people are doing,
these experts are doing, is mixing autism with things that
aren't autism in a way that allows practitioners to make

(39:22):
the case that there's been an explosion in what they
term developmental disorders. It looks even more stark if you're
Matt lumping all of these things together as the same
kind of thing, right, And thus they can make the
cases that there's a crisis that only bold experimental medicine,
like they happen to be selling contrite right. In other words,

(39:42):
by mixing all these things together, they're creating a grouping
of potential clients that include basically every parent, because almost
every parent is going to have a kid who has
one of these things. Right.

Speaker 3 (39:53):
That is incredible, Yeah, such a grift.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
Yeah. It's like if you're a mechanic and you're like, yeah,
you know, I deal with I got this great way
of fixing busted tires and also you know, bad spark plugs,
bucked up transmissions and yeah, and it's more of being
an incense stick over your cheek. So bring it in
as Fitzpatrick, writes Brian Jepson, another defeat autism now practitioner,

(40:20):
suggests that autism, which characterizes as both an environmental illness
and a multi organ metabolic disease, has increased because the
general toxic load in the environment has risen to a
point where so many of us have reached our genetically
determined toxic dipping point that the human species has now
urged edged into a state of what we might call
a herd vulnerability. Though everybody is considered to be at

(40:42):
risk from environmental dangers, campaigners believe that children are more
vulnerable to than adults, and that babies are the most
vulnerable of all. And this is a quick aside because
mercury is probably the most common thing people blame for this.
They took that mercury based preservative out of vaccines in
like two thousand and one. Rates of autism diagnoses continued
to rise after we stopped because it didn't It wasn't

(41:03):
doing anything. It has nothing to do with the vaccines.
We're just getting better at diagnosing it, all of it.
Human history has been filled with people with autism, we
just didn't call it that it is.

Speaker 3 (41:13):
It is amazing that like like obviously like mercury poisoning
and mad hatters and all the like. You know that
mercury has effects on Oh yeah, it's.

Speaker 1 (41:22):
It's had back when they put it in the hats.
It definitely on the population.

Speaker 3 (41:26):
Yes, But we're like we're totally cool with like botox
being botulism. But yeah, like can't differentiate between like the
mercury in the vaccine.

Speaker 1 (41:36):
No, it's also like chemicals are bad. But also I'll
shoot whatever into my kid if a doctor, if a
fake doctor, says it'll treat their autism. It's like, we're
scared of vaccines and you're putting these other shit in
your baby, Like, what is wrong with you?

Speaker 3 (41:53):
I know, I know.

Speaker 1 (41:54):
Now, I think this all kind of helps you explain
why that little boy with ADHD dying in a hyperbaric
chamber is relevant this episode. It's unclear when hyperbaric therapy
first started gaining popularity as and autism treatment, but by
the late nineties to the early two thousands it was
well underway as a practice among biomedical experts. That's when
they start doing this.

Speaker 4 (42:14):
Now.

Speaker 1 (42:14):
The most fucked up part of all of this is
that hyperbaric therapy is less dangerous than a lot of
the treatments that get prescribed because there are some potential
negative consequences when it's done properly right. You can have
some issues with it because it's super pressurized, but generally
people are fine after hyperbaric therapy, right, if it's done
properly right. This is not true of a lot of

(42:37):
the drug based treatment regimens that develop over the years.
The first, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:42):
When you mentioned h hyperbaric therapy, like, I know there
are so many like wealthy families sure have like tents
and stuff in their house and they're trying to reverse
their kids' autism. And it's like like that, I had
never heard of the glass tube.

Speaker 1 (42:54):
That is just yeah, fine, it's a nightmare. It's one
of I know, like Brian Johnson that Lift Forever guy
does have baric shit, And fine, he's in his late forties,
he's got five hundred million dollars, he gets to make choice.
He's more. I believe adults, if you want to put
yourself in the death chamber and potentially burn to death,
I don't give a fuck, do it right. And people

(43:14):
should be allowed to do a heroin if they want to.
Don't put your five year old. In these things, they
can't make that choice. So the first of these autism
drug remedies that that really takes hold is known by
the incredibly sustnamed Secretin. Now, Secretin is a real thing.

(43:36):
It's not like some made up bullshit. It's a hormone
that stimulates the secretion of digestive fluids from the pancreas. Right,
it's an and giving people that hormone can be useful
for a number of things. Uh. Part of why they're
there's there in. It's legitimate researchers who think, well, this
might be helpful in treating some of the things that
are correlated with autism, because people with autism often have

(43:58):
a number of different GI tract issues, right, it's very common.
I don't know that. I don't think we really know why,
because again we don't we really have a Still to
this day, we don't know very much about autism compared
to like what we would like to know. But this
is a thing, and so the idea that like, Okay,
well this hormone that stimulates digestive fluids from the pancreas
that might help with some of these side issues not

(44:20):
an unreasonable point. Right, So there's a they carry out
a test because there's a I think a mom who
gives some of this to her kid and she claims
a pretty dramatic effect. So they bring in like two
other kids and they do like an initial study on
this stuff. And again just three kids, and this is
an unblinded study, right, so everyone getting the drug knows

(44:41):
they're getting the drug, both the researchers and the people
getting it, which is like, again, if you're kind of
just housing initially, it's not you shouldn't base anything on this.
If things have been done properly and they've done this
first one, then like, okay, maybe we should we need
to do a blinded study now, which does actually happen.
If that's all that had happened, I'd say, and nothing wrong.
You know, you do this first thing that shows there

(45:02):
might be something to look into. You do a better
study with more kids that's blinded, next whatever. Unfortunately, the
media being what it is, always looking for a story,
and there being a lot of parents with kids who
are interested in this, immediately run with the whole. There's
been a miracle chair found. Right as soon as this
unblinded study comes out and the biomedical treatment activists in

(45:25):
DAN believe that they're dealing with a calamity. Right to them,
autism is a disaster that is severe in time sensitive right.

Speaker 3 (45:33):
Right.

Speaker 1 (45:33):
If you don't really get to fixing this in your
kid by the time they're three or four, you have
a ticking clock and they're just going to be fucked forever. Right,
So you really have to jump out. You can't wait
for science. Right. And so our friend doctor Rimland, who's
the founder of DAN, takes out a patent on secretin
before any other studies are done.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
Sorry, so he gives this past exclamation.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
He takes out a patent on this this this hormone
as an autism treatment, and he sells it to a
company called Repligon. Again, so many evil forms what.

Speaker 4 (46:10):
Is happening here?

Speaker 1 (46:11):
And always people like the farmer industry is evil, but
not repligion, okay, man, No trust his bullishness on this
hormone is based entirely on one mop this lady Victoria Beck,
who claims that her child shows dramatic improvement with secret In,
such improvement that doctor Rimlin describes Secretin as the most

(46:35):
important development in the history of autism. Months later, in
the summer of nineteen ninety nine, secretin makes its way
over to the United Kingdom, where TV news crews film
a boy with autism before and after Secret and injections,
showing dramatic change. Now, UK media is not the only
you know, not alone in this behavior, as writer Nancy

(46:56):
Schute notes in a piece for Scientific American media outlets
include in Good Morning America and Ladies Home Journal recounted parents'
joyous ch tales of children's transformed. Now, as is always
the case with this, that video was facilitated by a
shady clinic offering a lot of trendy bullshit medicine. Right,

(47:16):
that kid who gets filmed is provided with Secret and
by this clinic that sells nonsense drugs. Per Fitzpatrick's book,
this course was provided by a private GP who also
offered treatments for jet lag, chronic fatigue, and aging at
a cost of fifteen hundred pounds. Oh wow, so this
is just like a is this thing not regulated yet? Absolutely?

(47:37):
We'll shoot at India. What fifteen hundred bucks? Did take it?

Speaker 3 (47:40):
Give it?

Speaker 1 (47:40):
Get hand me your kid, I'll shoot them with whatever.

Speaker 3 (47:43):
I love that. I love that cures everything from autism
to jet lag.

Speaker 1 (47:47):
Yeah, I think that's different, different nonsense drugs, but I
see so. Unfortunately for Secret and advocates, within six months,
a double blind study of sixty children had come to
very different conclude lusions secreting was at best useless. This
was not a at least for treating autism. This was
not enough to immediately kill the industry. However, as Nancy

(48:09):
Shoote writes, by May two thousand and five, five randomized
clinical trials had failed to provide to reveal any benefit
an interest in Secret and waned. It took years for
that to play out, says pediatrician Susan Levy, who helped
conduct several of the trials. Research is very labor intensive,
and progress may be slow. Parents may feel helpless, she adds,
and they don't want to leave any stone unturned. And

(48:31):
there's like a kind of weird tragedy of commons thing here,
which is like, if your kid gets diagnosed to the
thing that we don't understand well how to help with
or even what it is, you may be best just
like loving them and trying to help them figure out
life and waiting for the science to figure stuff out,

(48:52):
because the alternative is you do what these parents do,
which is just you shooting random crap into your child
and I get there. It's the one of the biggest
problems in like emergency situations. Obviously there's the issue of
like people just not do the bystander effect, but there's
also this issue of people feeling like I have to
do something and then making the problem worse. When you're

(49:13):
trained in like emergency medicine, one of the first pieces
of training is like, don't just jump in there.

Speaker 4 (49:17):
You need to.

Speaker 1 (49:18):
Evaluate the scene, because the worst thing you can do
is try to go be a hero and add a
casualty to the situation.

Speaker 5 (49:24):
Right.

Speaker 1 (49:26):
You get like a down power line, the whole family
dies rushing to save one person, right because they're the
stress of not doing anything, which is sometimes the best
thing to do, is really hard. And that's what's going
on psychologically here too. So you know, by the point
that we are at now, there have been more than
a dozen double blind studies that all repeatedly mean the
same case. Secretin just doesn't work this way. Science and

(49:49):
the sheer in effectiveness of secretin has eventually brought it
to I don't think it's entirely extinct, but it's it's
not as common as it once was. But obviously a
lot of parent children are drugged and thankfully the side
effects of this aren't as bad as the next thing
we're going to talk about, But their parents are robbed blind. Right,
this is not cheap. Michael Fitzpatrick, himself a physician, writes this.

(50:12):
One day in surgery, the mother of a boy with
autism told me that she had spent the equivalent of
his disability living allowance for one year on a course
of secret and injections provided at a Harley Street clinic for
a single parent reliant on benefits. The outcome of this
encounter with a biomedical practitioner was not only disappointment when
the miracle cure failed, but financial hardship for the whole family.

(50:33):
And obviously these people don't care. They're lefting all the
way to the bank. They don't give a shit if
any of this works.

Speaker 3 (50:37):
Yeah, that's horrifying.

Speaker 1 (50:39):
And it's gonna get worse because again, at least secret
and doesn't seem to really fuck people up too much. Right,
it's just kind of useless. But the next thing is
not just that, you know what, doesn't have any hype
to it because it's just that good. Our ads all right,
everybody back. So all these studies are accumulating in the

(51:03):
hypover secretin is dying down. The con men offering cures
to desperate dan parents spun up a new strategy for interventions.
They had long believed that mercury poisoning was a root
cause of autism, so of course the logical place to
look for a potential cure was treatments that could reduce
the amount of heavy metals in a child's blood. Right,
If it's metals that are causing it, why don't we

(51:26):
look at ways to strip heavy metals from somebody's system, right,
And there is a way to do that. It's called
chelation therapy, right, like hyperbaric therapy. This is real medicine.
If you have like lead poisoning, for example, chelation therapy
can do a lot of good for you, you know.
And it's basically there's a couple of different drugs that

(51:46):
could do this. But you dose people with a drug
and it converts the lead, the mercury, and other heavy
metals that are in their body into less dangerous compounds
that you kind of pee out. Right, So it's great
if you're like a minor who has heavy metal exposure,
you know, but very few children really do because we
don't let them work in mines anymore. Give them, give

(52:08):
give the Republicans a year, we'll get back to. Kids
with autism very rarely have massive lead levels, you know,
And if they do, it is generally doesn't have anything
to do with their autism. It's because they grew up
in like Flint, Michigan. Right, And maybe then they do
need chelation therapy. Some kids do, unfortunately, there's a lot.

Speaker 4 (52:28):
Of Michigan's lander in this episode to.

Speaker 5 (52:31):
And in fact they problem it is the birthplace of
my parents.

Speaker 1 (52:37):
Yeah, well they might need some chelation therapy. I don't know,
so I won't ask. Is great if you've got heavy
metal exposure, right, But if you don't, it's harmful because
the process of like pulling all of these metals out
of because we all have heavy metals in us all
the time. Right. Trace levels, it's fine, it's fine. Sometimes

(53:01):
in some cases you need them, but in other cases
it's just fine. Right, teeny tiny bit of mercury, very normal.
Ask people who eat a lot of fish. Right. But
so if you're doing this, this has an impact on
your body. This is a drug that has a pretty
profound effect on you, and that means it does bad stuff.

(53:21):
And if you have way too much lead or whatever
in you, it's worth that cost, right because the lead
has kind of caused problems. But if you don't have
any problems that are caused by heavy metals, you're gonna
hurt yourself with this shit for no reason. Now, before
we get into the use of chellation for autism, I
wanted to start with I didn't see this in other
articles on chelation therapy, but I found a two thousand

(53:42):
and nine piece in Slate by Arthur Allen that talks
about the starting point of chelation as a snake oil cure,
and it does start before autism quote, well before it
was used for autism quote. Chelation therapy became a craze
in the nineteen eighties as a treatment for atherosclerosis and adults.
Opponents claimed patients were being harmed by mercury from their fillings.

(54:03):
Dentists use this as an excuse to pull teeth and
even removed jaw bones from their patients. When Haley, a
University of Kentucky chemist, was the high Priest of the
Amalgam Wars, when the Thimer assault theory emerged on the scene,
Hailey and other chelationists shifted their focus to autistic children.
So again, these are people who are like, yeah, let's
get with these crank dnnis. Let's put our pulling teeth
and jaws out of people. Give it them chellation therapy.

(54:25):
It's your fillings. And then like that kind of dies.
But then suddenly they see people blaming you know, mercury
for autism, and they're like, guys, we got a new grift.
Move on over here, move on over here. These parents
aren't looking for shit. So in the year two thousand,
this was still a fairly small number. It was fairly
uncommon for children with autism to undergo chelation therapy, and

(54:47):
at least you got some some of the small number
of kids with autism actually like had heavy metal exposure
that was unrelated, but you know, might have actually needed chillation.
By two thousand and five, there were more than ten
thousand children with autism in the un US regularly undergoing
chelation therapy. Almost none of them had any reason to do.

Speaker 3 (55:04):
So ten thousand kids.

Speaker 1 (55:06):
Yeah, and this is like a five year period of
time from a handful to ten thousand right on a
regular basis, so unlike secretin, chelation therapy involved dosing children
with an extraordinarily powerful drug that had dangerous side effects.
Telation can cause kidney failure, especially if administered in IV form,
which is exactly what most biomedical experts advised when treating autism.

(55:29):
The standard of care. You only really use IV if
you have to. You have other ways. There's like pills,
I think, there's creams that are less harsh on your body,
and you can generally do that with people who just
have heavy metal exposure. For a variety of reasons, including
to get more money from it. These guys are like, no,
you got to do an IV right, which we know
is the most dangerous way to do this.

Speaker 3 (55:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:48):
Chelation therapy can also cause heart problems, which again is poy.
You don't take this and lets you have to. One
person who absolutely did not need chelation therapy was Abu
Bakar Tarik, age five. He was the son of a
physician in Britain who had been diagnosed with autism. Tarik
had been Tarik's family described him as a happy and

(56:08):
energetic boy, but despite this, they also searched desperately to
cure him, eventually subjecting him to ten different kinds of
quack medical therapy, including hyperbaric chambers. Now, Fitzpatrick makes this
incredibly important important note when he writes about this in
his book quote this is characteristic of the unorthodox biomedical approach,
which recommends a wide range of interventions which are often

(56:32):
pursued simultaneously. This makes any judgment of which treatment may
be working or causing adverse effects impossible. And again, it's
one of those things. You're a parent, You're terrified. You
want everything, give him everything, But like that's not how
medicine works. If you give him everything, you don't know
what's working or not. Right, there's a reason why you're like, well,
we're gonna try one thing, we'll see what happens, then

(56:54):
we'll try another, you know, because otherwise it's not satisfying.
But you just can't do it the other way.

Speaker 3 (57:01):
Right, It's like an old sailor saying, right, like, if
you can't tie, could not tie a lot of bad ones. Right, Yeah,
it feels it feels like that, but but I mean
I was just thinking about like the the iv aspect
of it, Like IVY looks like the most scientific of
those things, right, Like prescribe you to cream like.

Speaker 1 (57:18):
This is a serious medicine.

Speaker 3 (57:19):
Yeah, happens.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
It's just more dangerous for your again small child.

Speaker 3 (57:25):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (57:25):
Yeah. Now, none of these interventions are based in sound
medical science or any scientists at all, science at all,
and they don't work. So Tarik's family as they're trying,
they're putting them in hyperbaric chambers and shit. They continue
to shop around for experts and diagnoses, and eventually they
find themselves leaving the UK, crossing the Pond to seek
treatment in the United States, which is how they wind

(57:46):
up seeking out doctor andju Usman, director of the True
Health Medical Center in Naperville, Illinois. Now, doctor Usman happily
diagnosed Tarik with heavy heavy metal poisoning. Specifically, she blamed
his case of autism on very high aluminum levels. Now,
actual blood tests didn't support this. He had low levels

(58:07):
of iron. He did have a slightly elevated lead level,
although we'll talk about why it's not because he necessarily
had normally a high lead level. There's no evidence that
his aluminum levels were raised at all. We don't really
know why she came to this conclusion, but still he
was prescribed an extensive series of chillation treatments which would
ultimately end in his death. Now, doctor anju Usman is

(58:31):
the still to this day, as far as I can tell,
the director of the True Health Medical Center, which brags
on its website to have provided integrative and biomedical treatments
that enhance traditional medical care since two thousand and three.
Her bio on the website says that she got her
degree from Indiana from Indiana University Medical School and carried
out a residency at a family practice in Cook County Hospital, Chicago.

(58:54):
She writes, during residency, I had my first daughter who
had severe food allergies in asthma. My second doctor, who
was born shortly after, was diagnosed with juvenile onset diabetes.
My third daughter had chemical sensibilities to environmental substances like
cleaning agents, perfumes, pesticides, and synthetic clothing. Even with my
extensive education and training, I felt ill equipped to handle
their medical issues. I began questioning my role as a

(59:16):
physician and healer. As she that's obviously a difficult situation.
It's never I was a sick kid with horrible asthma.
I have sympathy for that. It's scary, right, She claims
this experience as a mother led her to shift her
attention to treating the underlying cause of the disorders rather
than the symptoms. And again she talks about her extensive education.

(59:36):
None of it isn't doing this. Being a family practitioner
does not treat like teach you how.

Speaker 3 (59:42):
I'm not sure, as boss.

Speaker 1 (59:45):
You know, that's just not how it works. Yeah, yeah,
that's like you know, I'm an expert race car driver,
which is how I know how to drive an eighteen
wheeler for thirty seven hours. Like, No, there's a different skills.
There's maybe some ways in which they correlate, but honestly,
I would prefer a truck driver do that job. She

(01:00:07):
worked as an alternative health clinic called the Fifer Medical
Center in Warrenville, which was named after Carl Fifer, a
researcher who the CIA had paid to carry out LSD
mind control studies as part of MK Ultra. So great
namesake for the Fighters Medical Center. No notes.

Speaker 4 (01:00:25):
Cool.

Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
I will say doctor Usman's children's allergies were more significant
even than she writes on her bio for the center,
And I'm not blaming her for that. I understand why,
because her three daughters all suffered severe allergic disorders. One
had conjunctive itis so bad it caused cellulitis in her eyes,
and her eldest daughter, Priya, died in two thousand and three,

(01:00:48):
two years before Treik came to her clinic after an
anaphylactic reaction to peanuts. So what we've got here is
a legitimately draumatized mother who was trained in medical science,
but like not the kind she's got to be practicing,
and she can't really accept that sometimes horrible things happen
to your kids and that sucks. So she goes on
a crusade after concluding that aluminum toxicity causes everything from

(01:01:10):
allergies to autism, and.

Speaker 3 (01:01:12):
So she's just like over prescribing for everyone to save
every kid. Essentially.

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):
Yeah, I think that's kind of what's going on.

Speaker 3 (01:01:18):
It comes from a good place.

Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
It comes from like I understand how you got here,
but you are just going to compound harm, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:01:26):
Yeah, I mean it feels like a different type of
horrible than like the person who is sending text messages about.

Speaker 1 (01:01:32):
The right right right, get as many bodies in these shape.
Although actually she has Ah, She's got a sketchy history
with hyperbaric chambers. We'll talk about that. So Uzman was
a member of DAN and a fellow DAN doctor Kenneth
Bach agreed with her about aluminum. He has noted that
he's disappointed that she hasn't really published much of anything
about her findings on aluminum, which I suspect is because

(01:01:54):
there aren't in a bio for her clinic. Doctor Usman
engages in common bio medical practitioner tactics of blumping every
issue she can name together and insinuating, hey, these all
might be caused by the same environmental toxin, which in
her case is aluminum poison. Quote. I wanted to know
more about why my children and so many other children

(01:02:15):
and adults and epidemic proportions are suffering from chronic degenerative
autoimmune disorders such as asthma, allergies, arthritis, diabetes, OCD, mood disorders,
attention deficit disorder ADHD, and autism spectrum disorders. Now, like
a lot of these people, doctor Usmann considers ADHD to
be part of the autism spectrum. Again, mainstream medical science
doesn't really feel this way. On True Medical's website, she

(01:02:38):
provides us with a clear idea of how she interpeers
view people with autism. Quote, the mission in opening True
Health Medical Center came from my journey to help my
own children with these chronic disorders to lead productive and
healthy lives. This simple dream has been shattered for so
many families. Right, It's again this idea nobody with autism,
no kid can ever live like a happy life. Maybe

(01:03:00):
if you weren't drugging them more, would I don't know
if Tarik Nadama would have ever been productive in like
the capitalist sense of the word. But again, his family
described them as a happy, energetic child, so at least
that was in the cards for him until quack biomedical
treatments killed him. As I explained last episode, doctor Usman
had diagnosed him with heavy metal toxicity, despite there being

(01:03:21):
very little evidence that we have that that was the case. Now,
one widespread belief among parents in this community is that
by the time a kid is three or four, you
don't have much time to reverse the damage that they
believe causes autism. So time is of the essence, which
is why you have this shotgun approach to extreme therapies.
One of my sources for these episodes was a Chicago
Tribune article which quotes DAN affiliated pediatrician doctor Elizabeth Mumper

(01:03:45):
when she testified before federal court that quote, we feel
some urgency that we can't wait for ten or twenty years,
and that urgency is what leads to treatments like this.
So doctor Usman recommends Tarik undergo EDTA therapy, which is
like a type of drug you could do chillation with.
The treatment is administered by a different doctor at the center,

(01:04:05):
named Roy Carrey. Roy is again a retired E and
T surgeon, so none of this is within what you'd
call his wheelhouse. In two thousand and five, doctor Carrey
was sixty eight, he was not yet a listed DAN practitioner.
He did the year after Tarik died complete the intensive
eight hour training necessary to get that requirement, so that's good.

(01:04:27):
Tariq was his first time administering chillation therapy to a
child with autism. Now, doctor Usmont's website includes this very
friendly photo of her looking like a lovely, competent family doctor.
And I want you to see this picture that she
puts on her website. As I read this description of
the therapy that she endorsed and that doctor carry carried

(01:04:47):
out on young Tarik, I'm going to quote from Michael
Fitzpatrick's book here, Tariq's records indicate that to administer an
intravenous infusion he had to be restrained by at least
four adults using a papoose board. This device is a
flat wooden board with attached fabric straps which are wrapped
around the child's body and limbs to prevent struggling during treatment.

(01:05:10):
It was obviously impossible to restrain Toreek for the period
of several hours generally recommended for the chellation infusion, hence,
in contravention of specific cautions issued by the manufacturer to
reek suitably restrained receive this medication over five to ten
minutes in a rapid IV. Push. Oh wow, So they
are strapping him to a board, holding him down, and

(01:05:32):
instead of again the safest ways like do a pill
or a cream, the least safe way is an IV.
But when you're even doing an IV, it should take
hours because you don't want to do this too fast.
They are shotgunning hours worth of medication into his body
and fi his five year old body in five to
ten minutes while he's strapped to a board. So we
have known for a long time that This is bad

(01:05:53):
right doing DTA. Even if you do it properly, you
can people can develop irregular heart rhythms and have seizures
or even die. This is why the standard of care
is a slow IVY infusion. But because this kid doesn't
like being strapped to a board and shut up with drugs,
they do the most dangerous version of the thing and
he undergoes this three times. Tarik finally dies after his

(01:06:15):
third infusion. Doctor Carrie wasn't even in the room. He
gets bored and he leaves it up to another doctor
and a nurse to do this.

Speaker 3 (01:06:22):
He gets bored of the short procedure.

Speaker 1 (01:06:24):
He doesn't describe it as getting bored. That's my editorializing,
but like he didn't want to be there. You know,
he's sixty eight whatever, He's on a boat or some shit.
Per his medical records, Tarik's released during a subsequent lawsuit.
During the IV push, Tarik's mother, Marwan Nadama, said that
something was wrong. Doctor Mark Lewis took Tarik's vitals and

(01:06:45):
then Tariq went limp. Nurse Teresa Bicker called nine to
one one and helped with CPR while the ambulance was
en route. Tarik was taken by ambulance to Butler Regional Hospital,
where he was pronounced dead.

Speaker 3 (01:06:57):
Oh my god, it's just so it's so horrifying that
like the treatment itself is horrible, and then you're shotgunning
the treatment and then and this kid is like, uh,
strapped down and there aren't professionals there. Like the fact
that there.

Speaker 1 (01:07:12):
I mean there's a doctor and a nurse there, but
like they're not doing what they should be.

Speaker 4 (01:07:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:07:17):
Yeah, if you had anyone whose expertise was in chulation therapy,
they'd be like, what the fuck are you doing? This
isn't a wee do. If you're gonna give him this,
don't give him this. But if you are, like him
a pill.

Speaker 3 (01:07:27):
Fuck yeah. So.

Speaker 1 (01:07:30):
A forensic pathologist later identified Juick's cause of death as
diffuse acute cerebral hypoxic a shimic injury, and sub indo
cardial myocardial necrosis. Carrie was ultimately charged with involuntary manslaughter.
He surrendered his medical license in two thousand and eight,
but the charges were dropped, although in the December of
two thousand and nine, his license was suspended for six

(01:07:52):
months over the incident and he was placed on a
two year probation. So that's where we're in Nick part one.

Speaker 3 (01:08:01):
I have to say, uh, I mean, this is the
most I've smiled in an episode about children dying. It's
so sad.

Speaker 1 (01:08:11):
How else do you fucking I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:08:14):
Deal with this.

Speaker 5 (01:08:15):
It's awful that you yelling Dan is funny every time.

Speaker 1 (01:08:19):
Yeah, it does. I really knew that that was going
to be a load bearing part of getting people through
these episodes.

Speaker 4 (01:08:26):
It's been very helpful to me personally.

Speaker 1 (01:08:29):
Me too, Mago.

Speaker 4 (01:08:32):
You have anything you want to plug before the end
of part one.

Speaker 3 (01:08:36):
You know, we also talk about terrible things, but are
terrible things on part are more like the sunniest place
to hide your taxes or or like uh, why iron
Rand took Social Security and was a total hypocrite and
stuff like that. But it's uh, I don't know. If

(01:08:58):
I would love for people to check out the show. Yeah,
listen to.

Speaker 5 (01:09:01):
The Michelin star episode that you guys did when you
brought the show back recently, Like I don't know, it
was like a year ago maybe, yeah, Yeah, that was
a fun one for me.

Speaker 3 (01:09:14):
We did a really fun one recently on Pablo Xcobar,
the guy who was stealing rare bird eggs.

Speaker 5 (01:09:22):
That's fun. That's great. I love that, Robert. We should
we go.

Speaker 1 (01:09:28):
Yeah, let's let's get the fuck out.

Speaker 4 (01:09:30):
Of here, all right. That's part one. Behind the Bastards
is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from
cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is
now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday.

Speaker 5 (01:09:53):
Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind
the Bastards