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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 am 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, 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 imagine it will be very high. As one of the areas most affected was Mandalay, which is the second largest
city in Meammah. 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 Cyclonnagus, which would say terrible disaster in
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 in southern chance State right at the fiercest part of
the fighting right now. They don't fight. What they do as 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, 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 E l P hyphen m.
Y A N M A R.
If you'd like to donate somewhere else, An organization that you can donate to is a Free Burma Ranges. Free Burma Rangers dot org. They're 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 to Dave from FBR today. He's well and he told me that they're already starting to respond to the disaster. So to donate to them Free
Burma Rangers dot org. Thanks very much, we appreciate your support.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where you know Mengesh our great guests for today. You know that you ever heard that that that quote come at the time cometh the Man.
I haven't.
Okay, well, it's a quote people say, and I'm saying it now because I've decided. I had a dream last night, you and I on you when I was not. Excuse me, Sophie, let's cut that out. No cometh the time cometh the Man. And I had a vision last night while I was dreaming.
Yeah, you're really not helping this series.
No, No, I had a vision while I was dreaming about how to save America. And so I'm gonna. I've decided I'm running in twenty twenty eight, and I'm running on a platform of Look, one of the big problems the liberals and the progressives have. They all think, if you make education better, you know, if you get enough dunks on people in public debates or whatever, you can stop parents in the like from like putting poison into their kids to try to treat ill understood conditions, right,
and you can't. You can't stop people from wanting something to do. So let's give them something to do that's basically harmless. And that's why, as a presidential candidate, my entire platform is going to be legalize and subsidence using federal money. A seven dollars bar of xanax, the size of a Snickers bar. You just get them over the counter, any grocery store, any pharmacy, just a SNICKERX. You can lick it like a horse, you can do whatever you
want with it, seven dollars flat. You know, that's how we're gonna fix things in this country. Look, every problem the seven dollars XANX Snickers bar solved, Right? He got a guy walks into a fucking public building wanting to do a mass shooting, reaches for his gun, finds a seven dollars snickers bar, a XANX bites it, forgets why he's there. Problem solved. You know, everything could be this way.
I'm so glad. Yeah, this is this.
Is how we save America. I'm convinced everyone vote Evans twenty twenty eight for your seven dollars stickers bar of xanax.
I mean, we went to both the RNC and DNC, and you know, at least somebody's got a big idea.
Yeah, yeah, again, we won't have any more elect They are gonna be like three votes that make it in every election, and none of them will have a legit, like a readable name. It's just going to be scribbles on a piece of paper. Who's the president? Fuck it? Uh So, let's get back into this less happy story
of medicine. The Autism Research Institute and our buddy doctor Rimland wrote in to defend doctors Usman and Carrie after Tarik's death, writing in a post on the institute's website that Tarik had died not because of chellation therapy, but because of an error that had seen him dosed with a look alike drug dy sodium edta instead of calcium die sodium edta. Now, first off, I don't think the
argument we didn't kill him with bad medicine. We killed him because we cruelly administered a deadly dose of the wrong drug makes things beat. Yeah, that's like, no, no, no, I didn't give him finanyl. I just shot him up with way too much heroin. Like, I don't really see how that helps. This is also untrue. Tarik was administered with the normal kind of DTA used in chilation therapy, which is the only client kind the clinic had stocked.
In subsequent publications, doctor Rimland bragged that chelation therapy had consistently good results as rated by paraments who were surveyed by AR. In fact, it was the number one pick out of eighty eight approved interventions. A subsequent trist Yes, they love this because it's clearly is serious medicine. Right. It doesn't help, It makes things worse generally, but it's it has a massive visible effect. I think that's honestly the whole reason why.
Right.
A subsequent statement put out by Dan claimed that chelation was one of the most beneficial treatments for autism and related disorders. Now, aluminum, lead, and mercury aren't the only metals that got blamed. I found a Chicago Tribune piece that gives the story of a boy named Jordan King who was chelated for high levels of mercury and tin.
This is where there's a quote in there from like an expert on tin poisoning who's like, yeah, it basically it is for like industrial workers who are like welding tin for a living, you know, like, but not little kids. There's no way to get enough exposure to tin. Really, is your kid welding a shitload of tin? Then then we have other issues. It's not the problem you're letting your five year old world. What are you doing? Take that torch away from them? Now, the actual explanation for why this.
Kid productive, like, you know, sure, why why not?
Why not get that it's good for kids to have a hobby. There at least they're touch If they can't touch grass, they might as well teach touch hat in tin. Now again they do they do a test which shows high levels of mercury and tin in this kid's blood. But that's not the whole story about that and you're like, oh, well,
maybe there was something about why would they have elevated levels? Well, the explanation for why and for why all of the kids that get tested in order to justify this therapy have elevated levels of different heavy metals is because of the very the distinctly a scientific kind of lab test that they give these kids. Right, you would think, if you're like, this kid probably has high levels of heavy metals, we might want to administer chelation therapy. You're not a doctor, mangesh,
would you first? What would you do first? If you thought they might have high levels of heavy metals? Get a blood tuft right, very basic science, right, Okay, you think this is true, Let's test their blood. No, no, no, no, no. The way you give these blood is, first you chilate the child. You shoot them up with this thing that strips heavy metals out of their blood and makes them pee it out, right, and then you test them. Right, so you give them a drug that provokes them to
excrete heavy metals and then test them. And then you know what, You're gonna find some heavy metals because you gave them the drug that makes them excrete them. And here's the thing, there's no except because this isn't the way science. You don't do this otherwise. There's no accepted understanding for what normal results on a test given after chellation would be. So there's no actual medical case for
like drugging people and then testing them like this. So the lab just shows back charged that shows scary spikes of different metals, and the clinician says, look, kids.
Got it.
You know we need to keep doing this now, doctor, in case you don't believe me, and you should not. A doctor, doctor Carl Baum, director of the Center for Children's Environmental Toxicology at the Yale Newhaven Children's Hospital, calls this quote exactly the wrong way to do it.
Wow.
Now. Doctor Usman did ultimately face mild consequences. In two thousand and nine, The Chicago Tribune featured her in their Dubious Medicine investigation, which helped push for a pro by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. They alleged that she had provided medically unwarranted treatment that may potentially result in permanent disabling injuries to two boys. Quote from
the Tribune and reaching a consent order with Usman. Medical regulators alleged that Usman failed to disclose to her patients her financial interests in the company supplying the hyperbaric oxygen chambers and in the compounding pharmacy that filled prescriptions for her patients. The state said that she also failed to obtain informed consent for the chelation there and did not
keep adequate medical records for her patients. Usman, who practices out of the True Health Medical Center in Naperville, neither admitted nor denied the state's allegations, and signing the consent order, she agreed to pay a ten thousand dollars fine. Great, Ken, I love that this is the punishment.
Yeah, I know, I know. It's crazy.
Now, the other boy that she is accused of harming in this case was a Chicago child, the son of James Coman. We don't get this kid's name because they're a kid who was engaged in a custody battle with his ex wife over there, kid who was a child with autism. Now, the kid's mom is a believer of these biomedical interventions for their son's autism. James is not. James recognizes this is pretty dangerous and he gets trapped in this nightmare of trying to advocate for his son
against the wishes of the boy's mother. Here's how. A different article by The Tribune titled Autism's Risky Experiments describes his regimen of treatment. Quote, James Commen's son has an unusual skill. This seven year old, his father says, can swallow six pills at Once Diagnosed with autism as a toddler, the Chicago boy had been placed on an intense regiment
of supplements and medications aimed at treating the disorder. Besides taking many pills, the boy was injected with vitamin B twelve and received in intravenous effusions of a drug used to leech mercury and other metals from the body. He took megados as, a vitamin C, a hormone, and a drug that suppresses testosterone. They're just doing everything to this kid again.
Fact that he can swallow seven pills.
He's able to take so many pills. That's not talent. Yeah now. The Comban boy also suffered extreme negative side effects from chillation, although thankfully not fatal ones. This provoked his father to sue, and his mother responded by complaining that any interruption of his complex, nonsense therapeutic routine would have a disastrous impact on the boy, setting him back. You know that Tribune article written in two thousand and nine some up the scope of the biomedical movement at
the time. Studies have shown that up to three quarters of families with children with autism try alternative treatments, which insurance does not usually cover. Doctors many link to the influential group Defeat Autism now promote the therapies online, in books and it conferences. Intensive regiments are so common that one doctor recently joked at an Autism one conference in Chicago, you know you have a child with autism. If your
child takes more pills than your grandmother. He's joking about all the drugs you're giving kids.
I love that. Like, you know, you're a redneck.
If like is his the f share man that makes you sound good, sounds like you're a doctor great. It also made a point of discussing how the social media era had provided oxygen to the hyperbaric chamber fire that is the biomedical movement. Quote. Parents trade stories and advice about chelation on large internet groups. One Yahoo group has
more than eight thousand members. The treatment takes many forms, including creams for the skin, capsule suppositories and intravenous infusions of powerful medicines usually reserved for people with severe metal poisoning. The hype was so big around this stuff in two thousand and six that the National Institute of Mental Health announced a randomized control style trial of chilation as an autism treatment. So an actual legitimate medical body says, let's
do a trial. So many people are saying this helps their kids, let's look into it, right, and ultimately they cancel that trial in two thousand and eight because they can't find any evidence that there's benefit to it, and there's a lot of evidence that even trying this will put kids at risk, right, significant risk, because chelation is
not good for you if you don't need it. So like, it's actually unethical for us to study this because there's zero evidence that's helped anybody, and we know it hurts people, so we just can't do this to kids. Now. They also they've done some studies on lab rats that have showed that drugging lab rats needlessly with chilation therapy causes
cognitive problems. Right, so they're like, this, we just really can't justify doing this, and this is good logic for ethical scientists, but the crazed parents and con artist doctors of the biomedical movement take this as evidence that big Side, Big Pharma has killed another attempt to uncover the truth. Right, that's why they don't care about hurting kids. They just want to They want to keep selling us expensive medicine that actually isn't as expensive as the fake medicine.
That's so awful.
You see similar stories wherever you look at these nonsense treatments for autism. In two thousand and seven, the Cochrane Collaboration, an independent evaluator of medical research, reviewed the efficacy of casin and gluten free diets as treatments for autism, which
had become another bugbear for biomedicine. The idea that some of these biomedical people have is that gluten and casein interferes with kids' brain receptors, and advocates would cite studies which prove that proper diet could eliminate the symptoms of autism, But for scientific American cock And identified two very small clinical trials, one with twenty participants and one with fifteen. The first study found some production and autism symptoms, the
second found none. A new randomized controlled trial of fourteen children reported this past May by Susan Hyman, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, found no changes in attention, sleep, stool patterns, or characteristic autistic behavior. Slowly, the evidence is starting to accumulate that diet is not the panacea people are hoping for, says Susan E. Levy, a pediatrician at the Children's Hospital
of Philadelphia who has evaluated the evidence with Hymen. Of course, logic and evidence never drives the reactions you want to see in cases like this. Right, Fitzpatrick's book includes a quote from an anti mercury campaign in the US Generation Rescue. This is what's her name? The Oprah Ladies, Jenny McCarthy's organization. Oh ye yeah. This statement was made initially in response
to Tareik Nadama's death. You might want to recall here that Tarik was diagnosed with like high aluminum levels, not mercury. But whatever quote. We are not desperate parents willing to try anything. We are educated, caring parents who have done thousands of hours of research and administered dozens of medical tests on our own children under the care of knowledgeable physicians.
Wow, great, wasn't it wasn't Jenny Mathey's kid also like like she said he was this autistic and then she.
Said she's cured him. She says she's cured him. Yeah, I hope that kid is okay. I don't know. But now this kind of talk is like, well, we've actually we're the experts. We've done so much, you know, to understand this. It's very common among the loudest mouthpieces of the movement, which includes Jenny McCarthy. We've discussed before her appearances on the Oprah Winfrey Show, which played a massive
role in igniting the anti VAXX movement in the US. McCarthy, whose son Evan was diagnosed with autism, describes herself as having a PhD. In Google She does not, but she did have a role to play in the death of that five year old who burnt alive in a hyperbaric chamber. And two and sixteen, Jenny pivoted from her successful anti vax campaign and started advocating a hyperbaric oxygen therapy as
a treatment for ASD. The scientific argument she used was that people with ASD have and this is autism spectrum disorder.
Right.
The scientific argument she used was that people with ASD have inflammation in their brains, which is true. You can if you like, one thing you can see is that, like there's a level of inflation in the brains of people with autism. Inflammation in the brains people with autism. We don't know why, We don't know like how this relates to the like, we just know it's there. Right, So there's a lot of debate about this, but it
is something you see. And it is true that hyperbaric therapy has decreased other kinds of inflammation, but not in the brain. Yeah, different, like stuff doesn't always it's not all the same, right.
You know, even though right, the microbiome being different of autistic kids and diet not being able to affect the right.
Like, yeah, it's hard. Yeah. And so it's this thing where like you are taking two unrelated facts and using them to put kids in these death tubes. Now, actual analysis of the evidence, because there have been studies on this shows that the only basis for hyperbaric therapy as a treatment for autism was one flawed study that showed
a benefit. Per PubMed quote HBO two that's the name for hyperbaric therapy should not be recommended for ASD treatment until more conclusive, favorable results and long term outcomes are demonstrated from well designed, controlled trials. A write up from this time by the American Council on Science and Health states despite all of this caution in doubt, McCarthy believes
that she knows better. Her organization, Generation Rescue, is holding the third annual Autism Education Summit this weekend in Addison, Texas, just north of Dallas, to promote HBO two therapy for ASD. This conference included an expert panel of chiropractice and osteopaths, as well as along with those August medical experts, a YouTuber named Lily who made have video about hyperbaric treatment
helped her little sister. McCarthy was joined on the panel by Dell big Tree, producer of the movie Vaxed in one of the ladies from the Real Housewives of New Jersey. Truly posy from the Greatest Minds in Medicine awesome. Another conference expert was doctor anju Usman, whose husband sells hyperbaric chambers.
Oh my god, I was not expecting that twelve.
Oh yeah, baby, Now this is all made especially infuriating because four years before this conference, in twenty twelve, a four year old boy and his sixty two year old grandmother died after the hyperbaric chamber the boy was in caught fire at the Ocean Hyperbaric Center in Florida. Francesco had cerebral palsy, which hyperbaric therapy does not treat, and he had traveled to South Florida from Italy, where the treatment is illegal, with his grand mother and he caught
on fires. You tried to save them, they both die nightmarish deaths. Four years before this conference, where Jane McCarthy saying everybody should do this for their kids. Now, none of these deaths, none of these injuries, none of the illnesses caused by all this bullshit treatment means anything to most of these people. Their only interest is their children.
And one of the issues here is that because of the way autism works, for most people who have autism, you see, around the time the symptoms become evident, it
seems like they're regressing. Right, They stop making eye contact, they stop engaging as much, and this can be very dramatic and very shocking to parents, right, But most people with autism, their symptoms then improve over time because they grow up and they get used to dealing with and engaging in the world, right, they just that's just life. You know, this is going to be the case with the majority of people who get diagnosed with autism. You
will see the symptoms get alleviated. So if you're just dosing them with every random drug you can get your hands on, they likely show improvement in some ways just as they grow up and people convince themselves, I saved my kid. You know, at least they're better because of all of this shit I did. When like you could have just loved them with the help, you know, maybe gotten some dream of the gi issues or whatever, but like you could have just loved them, you know, you
didn't have to do all this other shit. But it's just like you know, life, people find ways to interact and deal with the world, like David Lynch.
You know.
This is again because people with autism are people. But yeah, as a result of this fact, many of these parents will go to their graves secure in the belief that they stood up for their kid and helped save them, even if all they did was make the world more comfortable for the kind of con men who encouraged children to avoid getting vaccinated for beaesels and speaking of connon, Nope, speaking of ads. Here they are, we're back. Good stuff,
good stuff, good stuff. So every now and then when you read about the biomedical community, you do hear about the rare winds. Right, these cases where a parent gets pulled into this, they treat their kid with nonsense for a while, and they realize I fucked up, and they pull back and they take accountability. And those are good stories. There's a great article in the Atlantic about autism's fringe therapies and it gives a story of Emma's Zurcher and
her family. Emma was born in two thousand and two, when she started to show signs of autism at like age two and a half, right around the time to Reek would have died right Her mother, Erie Anne, later described the realization of her daughter's diagnosis as being like quote descending into hell. I was desperate to save my daughter.
We went to everybody, We tried everything. For the Atlantic quote, she and her husband took immate neurologists, gastromineurologists, behavioral speech and occupational therapists, nutritionists, naturopaths, a shaman and a homeopath, a craniosacral therapist, and a quigong master. A developmental pediatrician who didn't take insurance, charged at least two hundred dollars per visit and had a month long waiting list recommended
they call a psychic. In Europe. The psychic ironically refused payment because she didn't pick up a signal from them when the psychics are moronics than the doctor's.
Holy fuck, like oh.
Won the psychics like now I don't want to rob you, you know, like holy fuck. They tried dozens of treatments that claim to have recovered children with autism, including numerous vitamin supplements, topical ointments, restrictive diets, chillation, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, brain scans, a so called detoxification system, and stem cell therapy. In other words, she went through all the con therapies
we've covered in these episodes and a bunch more. She describes her mind state after each failure as I thought, I didn't do it right, Let me do it again. And this is the consequence of this. It's not unreasonable to say they're like, well, if if your kid has a condition or an illness, part of treating it properly is the parent needs to be an advocate for their kid and involved in the treatment. Not an unreasonable statement, but there's this attitude that that means that like the
it's the parent is responsible for figuring it out. And like, well, but you're like a you're like a fucking accountant or something, like you don't know how to you you're not a medical expert. You know what you're doing, Like you know you shouldn't be diagnosing your kid here.
Also you can see how like you you like slip from one to the next and next because you're increasingly desperate. But like, yeah, once you're dealing with like a shaman, and like it feels like someone in.
A psychic shaman knows how to curas. The ultimate result of all these specialty diets was that Emma shed body weight at a dangerous pace, loosening fifteen percent of her weight in six weeks. Now, Emma's mom had by this point come to believe that her daughter had something that is another common line in biomedical HUI that GI problems like leaky gut might help cause symptoms of autism. It doesn't.
None of her attempts to fix Emma's microbiome worked. Arianne kept going quote, I thought any treatment was better than doing nothing at all. It's this, I can't think of anything else to do better press the gas, you know, Yeah, that's just not it's not smart, sometimes outbreaking. I have
a friend who's in er news. She says, sometimes the best thing to do with the site of a disaster is like smoke a cigarette and just kind of think things out for a second before you get in there, right, And that sounds horrifying to a lot of people, but this is a person who deals with emergencies every day. Sometimes your best bet is like give it a sec. Well, I mean, especially Threw.
Everyone in the autism community is telling you that, like there's a ticking clock right, like you're trying to raise and beat the clock.
And this is also it's another thing. It's the thing that gets people killed in war zones. You know, I've seen it like this, this desire, this feeling, a need to do something. When again, the people who are the real veteran, it's the people number one, they also do react when they need to, but they also don't react
all the time when they don't need to. They tend to keep to watch shit to think, you know, because otherwise you die horribly anyway, her kid loses a disastrous amount of weight, and none of these attempts to fix emma work at all. This is the state of mind, this idea, I've got to do something. That's most of what these parents find themselves in. And the market for quack cures has only grown. I stated in two thousand and nine about seventy five percent of parents of children
with autism reported using alternate medicine. Today's about eighty eight percent, nearly all of them if you have the money. They are a truly dizzy number of options available, like spect, a thirty five hundred dollars treatment that scans a child's brain to diagnose them and derive targeted treatments for their individual autism. This is in spite of the fact that
brain scans like spect can't reveal autism. They don't, you don't see it that way, and of course they can't like figure out this specific treatment has how to help your kid, right, But parents love that shit, like the oh, I'm going to get the exact kind of therapy for my individual kid. No, that's just you're not doing it this way. Sorry, maybe the therapy your kid needs is for you to just like them.
Well. Also, also, once your kid has autism and then you get a skin, you can point to anything and say, like, sure, the cost of this thing.
I don't know what it is, but it says autism, you know, probably the most costly of these new interventions of stem cell therapy. And this might actually be there might be treatment derived from this in the future. It's very far from clear at this point. Right at the moment, it is not approved as a treatment in the US. There are several trials gathering data on whether it's safer effective.
But again, the parents who think their kids have this ticking clock before their life is ruined don't want to wait, and as The Atlantic reports quote, several foreign clinics offer it for around ten thousand dollars. Sarah Collins credits the adult stem cell injections her two children received in Panama Seti, Panama with the recovery of her older son and improvement in her younger son. Both of them were diagnosed with autism. Her experience led her to co found the stem Cell
Therapy for Autism Facebook group. She says one reason parents might not want to take part in clinical trials in the US is that their child might wind up in the placebo arm of the trial. They won't mess with that, They'll go right to Panama instead. Again, you get both the psychology of life. Well, I don't want my kid to be I want them to get the medicine now. But it's like, ultimately, your desire to do something now is making your kid and everyone else you love everywhere
in the world less safe. Because good medicine relies on good double blind studies with placebos. That's how you do medical studies. And by delaying this number one, you are slowing down the process by which science will get done. But also by going to Panama to get whatever the fuck shot into your kid, will say that clinic doesn't
have good standards. Say your kid gets hurt, and maybe it's not even because of actual stem cell therapeages, because something else fucked up happened, but there's this horrible public death or illness associated with it, and that shuts down research into a thing that may one day lead to treatments that help people right, that alleviate some symptom or something.
You are doing nothing but harm by doing this out of this desire that like, well, but I got to focus on my kid, and it's like, no, it's this fucking no, no no. Emma's mom eventually made the right decision, after about seven years of trying this carousel of treatments, to reach out to an adult with autism and talk to them about her kid. This adult was Julia Bascomb,
who has a blog called Just Stemming This. Talking to Julia Keeter her in on the fact that well, maybe autism isn't like, doesn't mean my kid has no life. Maybe they could be happy as a person with autism, and I should focus on that because it's just the way they are, Emma's mom wrote, quote, my entire focus changed. Instead of fighting against Emma's neurology and trying to cure this heinous disorder, I started finding ways to help her flourish.
And that's it, really right, Like that's the ball game.
I mean, just to just robbing yourself of like the joy of being able to enjoy your kid and see them, you know, is stunning because you're so worried.
Yep, yeah, I mean, and it's it is tragic, like the amount of the wasted years you're so obsessed doing this that you're not actually having a relationship with your kid as your kid. You're having a relationship with your kid as a sick thing you need to fix.
Yeah, it's a guinea pig.
It's sad now in this case. So one of the first things she does when she has this shift in mindset, she realizes, like, Emma's not great at talking. This is a big problem for her, that like, your kid can't really talk and like communicate verbally. And so instead of trying and shooting her up with more drugs and shit,
she tries a different kind of intervention. She gives your kid a keyboard setup so Emma can type out her thoughts, and suddenly Emma starts communicating very clearly with people and the rest of the world. She gets on track to get her high school diploma. The fact that she now they figured out how she individually needs to communicate gives her a chance to advocate for herself and to live
a life. While Zurchier told The Atlantic that she now views the money she wasted on quack treatments as insane, and Emma herself insists that only occupational therapy provided her with any benefit, and occupational therapy is a real thing that can help. She also insists she's not angry at her mom. Quote, you thought my autism was hurting me and that you needed to remove it, but you did not understand that it is a neurological difference. Fear caused you to behave with desperation.
What an incredibly mature way to.
Type on Jesus. Yeah, and that would be a beautiful note to end on. Mangesh, this is behind the bastards, so we're not gonna end on that uplifting note. Instead, I'm gonna tell you a whole nother story about one of these quack bastards, one of the worst of these sons of bitches, an asshole named James Jeffrey Bradstreet. Three names, real serial killer. Shit for James Jeffrey Bradstreet.
Yeah, this episode and part one just the names.
The name always the worst. Born in July nineteen fifty four in Florida, Bradstreet was at one point a Christian preacher who got a medical degree from the University of Florida. We're doing great, knocking it out of the park so far. His postgraduate research was an aerospace medicine, and his actual career was as a family doctor. But In nineteen ninety seven, after he'd been practicing for a little over a decade,
his son was diagnosed with autism. As Fitspatrick writes, Jeff Bradstreet abandoned his career as a family doctor to become a radio talk show host. Great Great start, Great start. He immediately met up with the biomedical activists and founded the International Child Development Resource Center in Florida, or the ICDRC. In two thousand and one. He appointed Andrew Wakefield to
be head of research there. Brad Street was a big believer in merging his evangelical Christian faith with his treatments for autism, and so he created the Good News Doctor Foundation Now again. Bradstreet's training was two years of residency in obstetrics and some added training in aerospace medicine. He was not board certified in any specialty, yet he advertised himself as a biomedical expert in autism treatment who specialized
in correcting biochemical imbalances as well as detoxification. Wow, again, this is a guy who's like qualified to help your kid with the flu. You know, right, not to like downplay family medicine, but this is not a guy who's qualified cure among other things nobody is. It's not a thing. That's not a thing that happens. In the book Deadly Choices,
Paul Offatt describes Bradstreet's clinical approach this way. Bradstreet had promoted several cures for autism, including secret in chellation, immunoglobulin administered by mouth and by vain, and PREDDA zone, a potent steroid that suppresses the immune system. He also prescribed dietary supplements he sold in his office. As one expert put it, the nutritional supplements prescribed by doctor Bradstreet were also sold by doctor Bradstreet.
That's fine, cool, and this is we're like the late nineties, right, this is yeah, yeah, this guy would be on TikTok.
Oh my, oh he might have been. Actually, you know what, Sophie, good news. We're gonna talk about what this guy ends up doing in the present era. It's actually the best part of the story. So in nineteen ninety nine, Bradstreet began treating Colton Snyder, ultimately examining him more than one hundred and sixty times and ordering a number of invasive lab tests that were not approved by the FDA. Among these were multiple spinal taps. If you've had spinal tap.
That's not a thing you fuck around with. They're just stabbing this kid in the spine with needles. See that makes it better.
One hundred and sixty times. Feels very, very feels.
Like a lot of visits. Feels like a lot of visits. They also insert a fiber optic scope into Colton's stomach and colon as off. It writes all these tests and procedures were expensive, potentially dangerous, and, according to the opinions of expert witnesses, of no value to the child.
Wow.
Now, Brad streets. This is not said directly, but his parents have money. This is not cheap. That's why Bradstreet's doing this. His medical documentation of Snyder ultimately runs to some six hundred and fifty pages. He diagnoses the boy over the years with autism, yeast overgrowth, a funk infection unspecified, and sepalopathy unspecified, unicaria, and a shitload of other things.
And it's so many different things that it is clear that what's going on here is Brad Street has this is like a munchausends by doctor syndrome, right, And he's not doing it because he's deluded. He's doing it because he is a mercenary with the goal of keeping Colton's parents paying for very expensive tests and treatments for forever. Right, none of Colton's mercury tests wherever high, but still Bradstreet, who believed mercury contributed to autism, prescribed numerous rounds of
chelation therapy. A rite up in Quackwatch summarizes broad Street conceded that Colton did not respond well to chelation. The medical records, including reports from missus Snyder, reflected that Colton did poorly after every round of chelation therapy. The more disturbing question is why chelation was performed at all in view of the normal levels of mercury found in the hair, blood, and urine. It's apparent lack of efficacy in treating Colton's
syndroms and the adverse side effects that apparently caused. That's another thing you encounter where these parents and these practitioners. Practitioners will convince the parents, oh, yeah, if your kids having there, if they're responding negatively, that's the toxins leaving. Of course, it's ugly, you know.
Yeah, yeah, that's that's so hard, that's awful.
It's real fucked up these people should all have god to prison. They should all still go to prison. Yeah, but you know who shouldn't go to prison? Our sponsors? Is that what we're doing. I'm saying they shouldn't, Sophie, what do you want from me? We're back. So. In one conference in the early aughts, after Bradstreet had become a DAN affiliated doctor, he referred to parents who didn't blame their kid's condition on vaccines or subject them to
dangerous bio medical experimentations as apids or autism. Parents in denial. Right, if you just accept your kid and try to help them live their best life, you're in denial. You should be poised. Fitzpatrick notes that other experts in the field speak in similar ways. Quote Jenny McCarthy is dismissive of Woe is Me moms, though she is not above moaning about how shitty her own life is and reminding her
readers that celebrities suffer like everyone else. Still, she finds it difficult to accept that other parents don't simply believe in alternative treatments. Was it she asked herself, that they didn't want to hope or that they enjoyed the victim role? I don't know. Maybe they're just trying to do what's
best for their kids. Yeah. When the Chicago Tribune interviewed Bradstreet about his use of ivy immunal globulin or IVIG as an autism treatment, he told them every kid with autism should have a trial of IVIIG if money was not an option and if IVIG was abundant. Bradstreet also became a vocal advocate for hyperbaric oxygen therapy, although he did later publish research arguing it was ineffective, perhaps because
it wasn't a big money maker for his clinic. In two thousand and eight, more than five thousand families enmeshed in the biomedical movement launched a lawsuit seeking compensation for vaccine related harm in the US Court of Federal Claims.
Brad Street was one of their major witnesses. He provided expert testimony, which ultimately failed because the special Masters, which is the title name to the people who are like evaluating this claim, look into brad Street in part to determine if there's credible evidence to support the idea that
vaccines cause autism. They conclude it doesn't. They reject the case, and one major reason is the case of Colton Snyder, which they examine at length and hold up as like this is an example of how the malpractice is coming from inside the house. It's guys like Brad Street. Right, yeah. Still. By two thousand and nine, Bradstreet had been in practice so long that he claimed his institute has records on
more than four thousand patients. He got a California medical license in May of that year and established a branch of the ICDRC. Two years later, he got a Georgia state medical license and opened to clinic in Buford. Because staying competitive in the industry of fake autism treatments required constant innovation, Brad Street became an add the kit for a new autism cure late in his career. GcMAF. This stands for globulin component macrophage activating factor. And this is
a thing. It's a protein and healthy blood that you can remove and concentrate and use it to treat certain kinds of illnesses. Some kind of people are sick in a way that injecting them with this concentrated factor can help them.
Right.
It's a real thing for stuff, not for this, but for stuff. In August of twenty twelve, he gave a presentation in England in which he described injecting forty patients with autism with this shit, declaring I shouldn't call it shit. Well, but the stuff he is selling is shit. There's a legitimate version of this, that's not what he's selling, declaring, quote, it's extremely potent in terms of its ability to work for children. He announced, many from this experiment have gone
into basically lose the label of autism. They don't have autistic distinctions anymore. After sometimes as littlest twenty weeks of therapy. Yeah, this just isn't the way this works.
It's through the works.
But Bradstreet tended to show up up in the kind of crowds where he wouldn't be questioned. He claimed that doctors in Japan and Italy were working on the same therapy, and he also cited a guy named David Noakes, the head of an Immuno Biotech, which manufactures GcMAF, and he in fact, he shouts this guy out and then offers attendees to the speech of twenty five percent discount on GCMAL. Sounds like medicine to me, bro I love it. Gives me a fucking cupon for Blood Factory.
Well, it's coming from honestly because he's a radio host.
Sure, yeah, of course it does come right right absolutely Pearl Washington Post piece by Michael Miller quote. What he did not disclose, however, was that much of the research he cited had already been discredited and retracted the journal, considering Bradstreet's paper was the scientific equivalent of self publishing, and Bradstreet had close ties to Noakes and Immuno Biotech.
During the same UK trip, Bradstreet and Noakes made what was essentially a promotional video for Immuno Biotech and its brand of GCMF called First Immune. Quote. I'm here with doctor Jeffrey Bradstreet from the USA, the autism expert in the first Immune GcMAF laboratories. Nookes set on camera. Doctor Bradstreet has been using our GcMAF for in eighteen months, and we'd like to thank you for I think you've
treated nine hundred children. Now not just children, Bradstreet boasted, So the spectrum of my parent patients with autism ranges from somewhere around eighteen months to goodness somewhere around close to forty. So we've treated many adults with autism, as well as chronic fatigue patients, cancer patients, So we found application for a fairly broad number of disorders for the product The Truth. The two trading compliments for four minutes straight,
just gasing each other up for four minutes. Again, this sounds like medicine. Now. The transcripts for this are just impossibly fucking cringey, with Noakes saying We've never met a doctor with such an understanding at the microbiological level of how autism and cancer and other diseases work. Autism and cancer not really related, not alike, not at all alike other diseases. Again, not that I'm not saying autism is a disease, but like that's the way this guy's talking.
It's like, no, this is this isn't medicine. I know doctors are never like, yeah, we figure like this thing helps with the flu and I don't know.
Probably lunt cancer fucking and gout, yeah, gout.
And one of the things, like Brad Street goes back to after Noakes gases him up. He's like, this is the most sterile lab I've ever seen, the best equipment, the best people. This is the perfect like environment for doing good medical science. Brad Street then pivoted to make the pitch that the greatest thing about GcMAF was that you could use it without the presence of a doctor. In other words, regular parents could just buy the stuff and shoot their children up with it. Quote it's accessible
to anybody around the world through your internets. You've made it available very broadly. We've used it in South Africa, China, India, Eastern Europe, South America and all over. That's been a wonderful experience to see parents have access to a therapy. And like, so there's this this this drug that's a cousin of Benzo's that was like Soviet Union xanax that they gave to their astronauts that is like unregulated in
the US. You can order it by the kilogram like that, Like yeah, okay, but what if we just did that for children's medicine? You know? Oh man, it is so funny. I don't know.
Yeah, I just don't understand, Like how like it's so shameless, like going from children to like help people with autism, to like everyone with cancer to like.
It's just unbelievable. And again, the people selling Soviet xanax to strangers on the internet fundamentally an honest business. You know, by that shouldn't know what they're getting. You know, so this that like and you can give it to your kids. DIY was the ultimate pitch to the parents in the biomedical treatment community and the ultimate evolution of the founding principles that parents should be actively engaged not just in
caring for their child, but in diagnosing and treating them. Meanwhile, there was no real evidence that GcMAF benefited children with asd as Baylor's skill, a School of Tropical Medicine dean Peter Hotez told the Post. And by the way, doctor Peter Hotez also is the parent of a child with autism. An initial safety test of GCMF injections had not even been completed. It was still trying to recruit participants. So like, the actual doctors are being like, we don't even know
if this is safe. We haven't been able to get enough people to volunteer to prove that this isn't dangerous, not even to show that it works, and they're just selling this over the fucking internet. Even so, Bradstreet bragged about dosing more than two thousand children and claimed eighty five percent of them improved and fifteen percent had their autism eradicated. The initial hype was massive, but the actual
comments from parents who use the treatment were standard. Some claimed small positive while others claimed hard to rate changes like while he's talking more. Many though, recorded disappointment. Quote we have recruited twenty shots of GcMAF so far, I am still waiting for the wow that everyone talks about. One person wrote even worse. They described side effects including crying and pains in his chest and stomach. For at least the first three we are doing GCMA of injections,
I have not seen any gains at all. Another person wrote, I have seen worse behaviors in tantrums. So after spending thirteen hundred for no gains and living in hell, I'm done with this wow.
I can't imagine, Like, I can't imagine ordering something online and being like, yeah I should, I should send to my shot with a needle twenty times.
I don't know. Maybe that child will be a So I'm sorry. I know you you quote unquote love your kid, but that sounds like child abuse to me. Yeah, I like, obviously little kids don't understand. Sometimes you have to if they're sick. You have to give the medicine that they don't like that may have negative side effects, because that's just necessary sometimes, right, I get it, But like to do that for no reason, none at all.
Also, like, like, I'm sure some of this was causing some sort of delirium and the kids were talking as a result of that.
Kid's not doing nothing because by the way, Mango, we're about to talk about where this blood came from. Oh God, because I know, I know, I know. The first thing I thought was like, Wow, Christ, this is fucked up. This is not fucked up because they're like shooting kids full of blood that doesn't do anything, or maybe it hurts them. But also, like blood is rare, there's not enough of any of these blood factors. People need this, and you're not getting this stuff to people who need it.
The good news is that's not an issue here.
I'm afraid, so so nervous.
I've spent a lot of these episodes talking about what a bad idea it is to make parents with that medical training part of the diagnostic and treatment process in this way. But the brad Street story does have a positive ending due to a mom of two sons with autism named Fiona O'Leary. She came upon his scam and she gets angry. Right, she is not one of these moms who buys him the bullshit. She's like, oh, this
is fucking dangerous. Fuck this guy. She looks into his business and the web of shady, undisclosed financial interests he had with Immuno Biotech. She files complaints with regulators. I think this is over in the UK. I believe she lives. I don't know if she's in the UK proper Northern Ireland, given the named Fiona O'Leary, but she fought. This leads to the UK's equivalent of the FDA does an investigation that culminates in a raid on a First Immune g
CMF production facility near Cambridge. This is the lab where he filmed that video where Bradstreet films the video with noakes, where they casting each other up.
I heard was pristine you.
So while Brad praise the Labis sterility, UK regulators described it as making g c MF out of quote Blad blood plasma labeled not to be administered to humans or used in any drug products. They're getting this out of the shit, But does that make it better? Because at least regular like people who need blood aren't losing it. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know what we say here?
Oh my god, so sad.
Eventually she succeeds. It's so fucked up right, Oh my god, where was this blood coming from? She succeeds eventually in getting US regulars to look into Brad Street, which brought the Feds to his door in Buford on June eighteenth, twenty fifteen. Had he been indicted properly, Bradstreet might have faced twenty years in prison according to the suspected charges of the search warrant. Rather than endure that, Bradstreet fled town the next day, driving to North Carolina. As he
checked into his hotel. Swiss papers reported a story from Switzerland that he Firststmune clinic in that country, run by Noakes, had been shut down after five patients being treated with GcMAF had died. Some had paid almost as much as six thousand euros a week for treatment. And to be clear, we don't know that the GcMAF killed those people. These were terminal patients, right, But this was billed as helping
terminal conditions and it didn't, right. So there's a big raid on his partner, Noakes, that and the raid on his own facility in Buford probably contributed to Jeffrey's decision to take his own life on June nineteenth. His body was found by a fisherman that afternoon, floating like a river, and the gun he used was found nearby in the water.
This immediately became a conspiracy for biomedical advocates, including the CEO of him you Know Biotech, who insisted that Jeffrey was murdered by pharmaceutical companies for stating that the MCAR vaccine causes autism and hurting their profits with his GCMFA therapy. And unfortunately what happens here is kind of the best case scenario in this world. One major agent of harm faces a teeny bit of justice and then makes a
choice to take himself out of the the picture. Right to this day, though, Bradstreet remains a focus of vaccine conspiracists. And I found this in a Reddit post on the our Conspiracy Commons board from twenty twenty two, and it's like a picture of this guy in a suit. This is Jeffrey Bradstreet. He found the cure for autism using oxygen chamber therapy, chillation, and protein shots for tea cells.
After having cured thousands, he was shot in the back twice at his mansion, and the FBI raided and destroyed his cure center the day after. Now, none of that's accurate. They raided his center the day before. He's not at his mansion. He tries to check into a hotel and can't check in, and then he goes to the river, Like this is just all wrong.
But it's also like such a hydra right, Like it feels like you cut off the head and like all these others emerge. It's awful.
Yep.
Anyway, that's our story for the week. Great stuff.
It's super uplifting.
Betrails everybody. They you know, you got any plugs to plug?
Yeah, definitely. I did a show called Skyline Drive, which is about a skeptical look at astrology.
And it's really good and.
I would love for people to check it out if they had the time. But uh, honestly, Robert Sophie, this is just so fun. I know, I was like just shocked and saying, oh my god, more than I probably should have. But it was both horrifying and and I don't know, really enlightening.
Yep, well, glad to be horrifying and enlightening, horror enlightening.
And now I see that Snickers bars.
X that's right, that's right.
Yeah.
Now again, this is the the solution to all of our problems is the seven dollars snickers bar of xanax right. Look, yeah again, vote vote Evans Snickers b x X in every pocket. And honestly, none of us is gonna know what happens next, but that's of the benefit rights. And look, are some people gonna die? Absolutely, And we're going to knock down the Washington Monument and replace it with a monument that's just a four bar four bar in the sky problem solved.
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