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

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 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

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

so much oxygen into your tissues. There are people who 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.

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, 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.

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.

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 can cause an explosive fire that instantly burns you to death.

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 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.

what was going on. Oh my god, and yeah, the kid dies and just.

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, but on the death chamber that burns children alive.

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, 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 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. 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 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.

What the fuck, lady. So this is the story that 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 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

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 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.

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, 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. 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.

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 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.

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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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.

just you're different. And so there are different ways that you're going to interact with and view the world and 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 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 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 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.

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, 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

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. 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, 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 it would be an error not to include that.

that hyperbaric chamber. At I was thinking these things were death traps until they said fifteen percent of where whatever the fuck you want.

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, as a rule, people in the I don't know how else to pronounce it.

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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, 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.

an incense stick over your cheek. So bring it in as Fitzpatrick, writes Brian Jepson, another defeat autism now practitioner, 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 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

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.

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

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 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, 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? We'll shoot at India. What fifteen hundred bucks? Did take it?

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

same case. Secretin just doesn't work this way. Science and 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.

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. 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.

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 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 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 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.

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. 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 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. 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. 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 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.

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.

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

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

I would prefer a truck driver do that job. She 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.

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 allergies to autism, and.

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 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 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 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

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 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,

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. 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 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. 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 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

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

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.

en route. Tarik was taken by ambulance to Butler Regional Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

two year probation. So that's where we're in Nick part one.