Speaker 1: A media.
Speaker 2: Hi, everybody, it's James here. If you don't listen to
Speaker 2: it could happen here, you might not recognize me. My
Speaker 2: name is James Stout and I'm the guy who pops
Speaker 2: onto this feed every few months to tell you something
Speaker 2: very sad and then ask for your money. And that's
Speaker 2: why I'm here today. A terrible earthquake struck me and
Speaker 2: Ma today the day I'm recording this, which is Friday,
Speaker 2: the twenty eighth of March, it was seven point seven
Speaker 2: on the Rigter scale. We know of more than one
Speaker 2: hundred deaths, but it's likely the death toll is much
Speaker 2: much much higher. Lots of the telegraph and internet infrastructure
Speaker 2: has been taken out by the earthquake, and the Hunter
Speaker 2: restricts internet and social media access, so we don't really
Speaker 2: know the full extent of the death but we can
Speaker 2: imagine it will be very high. As one of the
Speaker 2: areas most affective was Mandalay, which is the second largest
Speaker 2: city in Memmah. I've spoken to half a dozen sources
Speaker 2: in Memma today, people who Robert and I have interviewed before.
Speaker 2: They're all okay, but they all shared how terrible things were.
Speaker 2: They said things were as bad as they were at
Speaker 2: the time of Cyclonagus, which would say terrible disaster in
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight. If you would like to support
Speaker 2: the people of Burma who are currently fighting against tyrannical
Speaker 2: dictatorship as well as dealing with the consequences of this
Speaker 2: natural disaster, there are a couple of ways you can
Speaker 2: do so. I was actually already running a fundraiser on
Speaker 2: my Patreon for MOBIAPDF. They are a casualty evacuation team
Speaker 2: in southern Chance State right at the fiercest part of
Speaker 2: the fighting right now. They don't fight. What they do
Speaker 2: is they go and they evacuate people who have been injured,
Speaker 2: and they provide medical services to internally displace people. They've
Speaker 2: been doing this since twenty twenty one. They're incredibly brave
Speaker 2: people and they've saved more than three hundred lives. You
Speaker 2: can read more about them by going to my Patreon post,
Speaker 2: which also includes all the links for donation. The website
Speaker 2: for that is TinyURL dot com slash help hyphen Meanmar.
Speaker 2: That's TinyURL dot com slash h ELP hyphen m y
Speaker 2: A n M A R. If you'd like to donate
Speaker 2: somewhere else, An organization that you can donate to is
Speaker 2: to Free Burma Ranges. Free Burma Ranges dot org. They're
Speaker 2: a fantastic endio. They've been doing a lot of medical
Speaker 2: work in the liberated zones of BMR for a very
Speaker 2: long time. They've also worked in Java and lots of
Speaker 2: other place around the world where people need help. I
Speaker 2: spoke today from FPR today as well, and he told
Speaker 2: me that they were already starting to respond to the disaster,
Speaker 2: so to donate to them Free Burma Ranges dot org.
Speaker 2: Thanks very much, well appreciate your support.
Speaker 1: Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that
Speaker 1: is happening right now to your ears. There's nothing you
Speaker 1: can do about it, except for like turn off your
Speaker 1: phone or your headset. But don't do that. Listen to
Speaker 1: these great episodes that we have with my good friend
Speaker 1: manyash Man gash Welcome to the program.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me. Robert and Sophie,
Speaker 3: I'm thrilled to be.
Speaker 1: Here's here you you used to work at the company
Speaker 1: that we currently work at, and now you're you're independent.
Speaker 1: You're a you're a pirate, you know, fly in your
Speaker 1: own flag in the middle of the sea. But the
Speaker 1: sea is podcasts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I mean a jolly pirate, I hope.
Speaker 4: But Andy and you co host a podcast with our
Speaker 4: boss and friend Will Pearson called part Time.
Speaker 1: Genius Our Boss Friend.
Speaker 5: All right, but friend and Boss. I notice how I
Speaker 5: ordered that, and people should listen to it. It makes me.
Speaker 5: It's like a podcast that'll make you happy. You'll like
Speaker 5: get to learn a thing, but it'll be fun.
Speaker 3: That is so sweet, it really is. It's like the
Speaker 3: way that we used to talk in college, really nerdy
Speaker 3: and lay into the night and just making each other laugh.
Speaker 3: And it feels nice that we get to do that
Speaker 3: still all these years later.
Speaker 5: Excellent, Well, beautiful, you're not gonna you're not gonna feel
Speaker 5: good after we tell you, uh, what we're talking about today.
Speaker 1: Well, we're gonna What we're gonna talk about today is
Speaker 1: not something that will make you feel good.
Speaker 4: It's gonna make you feel really bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're gonna talk about the history of quack snake
Speaker 1: oil cures that kill children in an attempt to cure
Speaker 1: them of autism. Oh my gosh, I'm not laughing at that.
Speaker 1: That's that's that's horrible, which is why we're talking about it.
Speaker 1: But it's such a thing to.
Speaker 3: Be like and just like, like, have a box of
Speaker 3: popcorn and listen to you tell me stories.
Speaker 1: Yeah, ten thousand words of some of the bleakest ship
Speaker 1: you've ever heard is about to be coming your way.
Speaker 1: Congraund No, thanks for showing up this week.
Speaker 3: I can't wait.
Speaker 1: So you know, I'm gonna start this by saying, we're
Speaker 1: talking about like autism quote unquote cures. There's no way
Speaker 1: to cure autism, which a thing is the thing we
Speaker 1: now understand is like a condition. It's a way some
Speaker 1: people are but it is treated often still as a
Speaker 1: disease that needs to be eradicated, as if it's like
Speaker 1: a plague. And a lot of harm comes from kind
Speaker 1: of the discrepancy between the reality of the situation and
Speaker 1: how a great deal of people see it. And this
Speaker 1: week we're going to talk about this specifically the Grifters,
Speaker 1: a group called the biomedical movement, which is these are
Speaker 1: all people who are adjacent to guys like Andrew Wakefield.
Speaker 1: They're all people who sell different kinds of we're talking
Speaker 1: about like chellation, therapy and shit, all sorts of different
Speaker 1: like treatments and cures. They call them interventions, and ultimately
Speaker 1: the impact of all of this stuff is that it
Speaker 1: poisons a lot of children. Oh so the inciting incident
Speaker 1: for me working on these episodes. Maybe you heard about
Speaker 1: this story, man gosh Is. On January thirty first, a
Speaker 1: five year old child suffering from ADHD and sleep apnea
Speaker 1: was admitted to the Oxford Center in the Detroit suburb
Speaker 1: of Troy for treatment. Now, well, that name, the Oxford
Speaker 1: Center sounds great, right, That sounds like a legitimate place
Speaker 1: of medical science. Right Oxford. We all know that's a
Speaker 1: good name, and that means something real. Has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with the college, has nothing to do with academics
Speaker 1: at all. It is instead a place where parents take
Speaker 1: their children to have unproven medical experiments conducted on them
Speaker 1: for profit. One of those experiments was the use of
Speaker 1: hyperbaric therapy to treat ADHD and sleep apnea. Now it'd
Speaker 1: be very clear hyperbaric therapy is a thing. It's a
Speaker 1: very real medical thing, right, Like I think it got
Speaker 1: its start in use. Basically, it's like pressure, pressurizing and
Speaker 1: oxygenating like an area, a room, or in the case
Speaker 1: of what this kid was, being put in a little
Speaker 1: glass too. But it starts with like if people diving,
Speaker 1: and when you're diving, particularly at like certain depths for
Speaker 1: too long, you get like all of these gases building
Speaker 1: up in your blood. And if you like surface, even
Speaker 1: if you're doing it slowly, there's a certain point in
Speaker 1: which you can't surface on your own slowly enough to
Speaker 1: like have that stuff dissipate and not fuck you up.
Speaker 1: So you go into a hyperbaric chamber and it basically purges.
Speaker 3: For like the bends or whatever.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Essentially this is like people who
Speaker 1: are doing like very deep sea like when they're welding
Speaker 1: at the bottom of like ol rigs and stuff. That's
Speaker 1: one of the things you use this for. But they
Speaker 1: found there's other things Hyperbaric chambers are great for actually
Speaker 1: over over the years because it oxygen, It like forces
Speaker 1: so much oxygen into your tissues. There are people who
Speaker 1: have certain kind of like injuries that won't heal, like
Speaker 1: people with diabetes right often can get injuries and like
Speaker 1: their feet that don't heal. A hyperbaric chamber can like
Speaker 1: force the healing process to start. Basically, don't they don't.
Speaker 3: They use it for like NFL players or like there's
Speaker 3: some I feel there's some athletes do it.
Speaker 1: Right, and there's some there's some discussion that there may
Speaker 1: be some like benefits there. That's when we get more
Speaker 1: into the snake oil, right, because most of much of
Speaker 1: what hyperbaric chambers use for is not the stuff where
Speaker 1: it's proven to help. You know, Again, there's maybe some
Speaker 1: sports medicine benefits to it, and there's stuff like if
Speaker 1: you have radiation injuries, hyperbaric chambers can help. So there
Speaker 1: are some new uses. These are actually very This is
Speaker 1: actually a very powerful therapy for certain proven things. However,
Speaker 1: there's no evidence that it does anything for ADHD or
Speaker 1: sleep apnea zero, just not things that it helps with.
Speaker 1: But there's this widespread belief that comes out of this
Speaker 1: bio medical movement for like trying to treat and cure autism,
Speaker 1: that hyperbaric chambers are useful for that. And I know,
Speaker 1: I said, this kid has ADHD in sleep apnea. Kind
Speaker 1: of the gist of the story that we'll be telling
Speaker 1: is an awful lot of these same people believe ADHD
Speaker 1: is another type of autism, which is not the mainstream
Speaker 1: scientific concept.
Speaker 3: Understanding.
Speaker 1: But that is part of why this gets lumped in
Speaker 1: and it gets lumped in because you can then sell
Speaker 1: hyperbaric therapy to more people with kids. Right, So again,
Speaker 1: hyperbaric chamber chamber is pretty cool, but they're not useful
Speaker 1: for the problems that this five year old kid, Thomas
Speaker 1: Cooper had, And because the Oxford Center existed to take
Speaker 1: money from parents with kids who had autism and other
Speaker 1: stuff going on, they didn't really care about scientific rigor
Speaker 1: or even basic safety protocol. So here's the thing about
Speaker 1: doing a therapy like this. You have essentially like one
Speaker 1: hundred percent oxygen. Now do you remember, mangesh, what happened
Speaker 1: to that Apollo mission that back when they were using
Speaker 1: one hundred percent O two inside of the spacecraft.
Speaker 3: It doesn't seem like a smart it.
Speaker 1: It caught on fire on the inside and everyone died
Speaker 1: a horrible det Now there's a way to deal with this, right,
Speaker 1: because there's a part of the benefit of a hyperbaric
Speaker 1: chamber when it's useful is how much oxygen there is
Speaker 1: in there and the way that the pressure works with that.
Speaker 1: But when you have this much oxygen, you have to
Speaker 1: take a lot of weird precautions to make sure that
Speaker 1: everyone inside the chamber doesn't get incinerated. So, among other things,
Speaker 1: if you're in a properly run hyperbaric chamber, you are
Speaker 1: going to be only wearing like cotton fabric, right, because
Speaker 1: wool and polyester can cause extremely tiny sparks when it
Speaker 1: rubs against other fabrics or whatever in such an environment,
Speaker 1: and normally you don't notice that, but the smallest spark
Speaker 1: can cause an explosive fire that instantly burns you to death.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: The other thing that you do if you're putting someone
Speaker 1: in this, in addition to making sure they're wearing the
Speaker 1: right fabric, is you put a grounding thing on their wrist. Right.
Speaker 1: If you've ever built computers out of parts, you've used
Speaker 1: one of these, and it's to stop you from like
Speaker 1: a static discharge from fucking up this very precious machinery
Speaker 1: that you're putting inside of a box. We put those
Speaker 1: on a person, and that also reduces the risk. Right.
Speaker 1: None of this was done in this situation. This kid
Speaker 1: was wearing whatever, I think he was wearing polyester, right,
Speaker 1: and he had like a polyester blanket to nobody really
Speaker 1: made sure, and he wasn't grounded right, And so at
Speaker 1: one point he turned over and there was a spark
Speaker 1: and his entire body immediately ignite it. And the hyperbaric
Speaker 1: chamber he was in was a small glass tube just
Speaker 1: big enough for a person's body, so he had no move.
Speaker 1: There's no escaping, there's no way to get out. He
Speaker 1: is just in a tube of glass on fire. His mom,
Speaker 1: who's sitting nearby, there's no medical professionals nearby, breaks tries
Speaker 1: to break with him.
Speaker 3: Now medical professionals, of.
Speaker 1: Course, not, of course, not again, this isn't a medical procedure, really,
Speaker 1: you know, yes, yeah, So his mom is sitting nearby
Speaker 1: and she tries to break into this contraption and suffers
Speaker 1: third degree burns to her arms trying to save her
Speaker 1: little boy. Her lawyer later said it's literally the worst
Speaker 1: thing any parent could experience, and poor Thomas his last
Speaker 1: moments of life were being engulfed in flames and perishing
Speaker 1: in front of his mother. He was certainly aware of
Speaker 1: what was going on. Oh my god, and yeah, the
Speaker 1: kid dies and just.
Speaker 4: As aably horrible.
Speaker 1: As an aside, every time this happens, the person dies. There.
Speaker 1: This is a one hundred percent fatality rate problem when
Speaker 1: it's in a chamber this small. If you're in like
Speaker 1: a much bigger chamber. There's like some ways too that
Speaker 1: you could potentially escape. But when a fire happened, When
Speaker 1: this kind of fire happens in this kind of condition,
Speaker 1: people don't live right, Like, that's just that's just the
Speaker 1: way it is.
Speaker 3: And so so so for these treatments, are are they
Speaker 3: just coming like once? Is it like like.
Speaker 1: Not nearly as much money? People do this as many
Speaker 1: times as you can get him to pay, oh.
Speaker 3: So so like, and was this the first time that
Speaker 3: this kid had been there or had been.
Speaker 1: I think this was the first time for this kid,
Speaker 1: but I'm not actually certain.
Speaker 4: And there's no medical professional nearby, nobody nothing.
Speaker 1: No, there's usually someone generally like a retired doctor. It's
Speaker 1: kind of getting a pot prescription used to be where
Speaker 1: like you've got some guy he's not really you know,
Speaker 1: he used to be a fucking e n T doctor
Speaker 1: and he doesn't do that anymore. But he like sign
Speaker 1: some paper work, right, maybe it comes by once a week. Yeah,
Speaker 1: You're like, you're like, because it's weed this it's not
Speaker 1: fun when it's a the when it's to burn you
Speaker 1: to death chamber.
Speaker 5: No, it's like, uh, you know, you go home and
Speaker 5: google the person who gave you the prescription and go,
Speaker 5: what fucked up thing did you?
Speaker 3: Yeah? What did you?
Speaker 1: How many people did you get killed? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Why do you barely have a medical license?
Speaker 1: Those were the days. My friend.
Speaker 4: Menis speeds.
Speaker 1: So Michigan, which is where this happens, had no rules
Speaker 1: at the time, Michigan. Yeah, And there were absolutely no
Speaker 1: rules about how hyperbaric chambers had to be like maintained
Speaker 1: when you were doing stuff, like there's absolutely no standards.
Speaker 1: The government does come in, they find out that these
Speaker 1: the Oxford Center had old machines that were way past
Speaker 1: the date at which they would have needed to be
Speaker 1: refurbished to operate safely, and it makes matters worse. There's
Speaker 1: like a because these are devices where people die if
Speaker 1: they're not working properly. There is a life cycle indicator
Speaker 1: that tells you how many times it's been used, so
Speaker 1: you know if it has to be refurbished before further use.
Speaker 1: And they had illegally dial back that number like you
Speaker 1: do like a used car stealers do on a car. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but on the death chamber that burns children alive.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: Further investigation by the authorities found per this USA Today article, quote.
Speaker 1: The Oxford Center staff failed to meet the following safety
Speaker 1: standards on the day of Thomas's death. Number one conduct
Speaker 1: his daily maintenance check in pre dive safety check. Number two.
Speaker 1: Have a medical doctor or safety supervisor at the Troy
Speaker 1: facility at the time of Thomas's treatment. Number three. Provide
Speaker 1: a licensed technician to perform the treatment. Number four require
Speaker 1: Thomas to wear a grounding strap during his treatment. None
Speaker 1: of this was done. Ultimately, both the facility safety director
Speaker 1: and the CEO of the company were charged with negligence.
Speaker 1: The CEO, Tamila Peterson, has to go down as the
Speaker 1: most irresponsible single individual in this story. When it became
Speaker 1: clear that this five year old had died in her center,
Speaker 1: detective showed up. Because a five year old burnt to death, right,
Speaker 1: You're gonna send some detectives in. And she immediately flees
Speaker 1: the scene and takes her laptop to her young son
Speaker 1: and tells him to scrub it. Great, good moment. Immediately
Speaker 1: implicate your kid too. Excellent work, responsible parenting, We love
Speaker 1: to see it. This is a helicauster parent, but in
Speaker 1: the sense that helicopters are extremely dangerous and kill everyone
Speaker 1: inside of him. So thankfully. Again, the youth these days
Speaker 1: not great with computers. Her kid doesn't really know how
Speaker 1: to scrub a laptop, and so it doesn't get scrubbed.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote from an article by the Detroit
Speaker 1: Free Press here. Still, police found electronic messages on Peterson's devices,
Speaker 1: said detective Danielle Trigger. Great name for a detective, by
Speaker 1: the way, including an exchange in which Peterson sent photos
Speaker 1: of the boys burning body and wrote something to the
Speaker 1: effect of, if my leg was on fire, I would
Speaker 1: at least try to hit it and put it out.
Speaker 1: He just laid there and did nothing. She is roasting
Speaker 1: a dying five year old hopes, Oh my god, and
Speaker 1: lady up. Also, Danielle Trigger, that's like a that's like
Speaker 1: an Airport mystery novel series character Dave. That can't be
Speaker 1: a real detective.
Speaker 4: Saying that's Nancy.
Speaker 1: It is very funny. Like if you are Danielle Trigger,
Speaker 1: you just kind of have to become a detective. Like
Speaker 1: you try to be a beat cop and there's like no, no, no,
Speaker 1: You're going right to murders. Take off that uniform. You
Speaker 1: are putting on a trench coat. Peterson's messages also showed
Speaker 1: that When she was asked whether the company was promoting
Speaker 1: hyperbaric chambers to treat a rectile dysfunction, she responded, whatever
Speaker 1: gets bodies in those chambers? Lol, according to Jesus Christ crimes.
Speaker 1: What the fuck, lady. So this is the story that
Speaker 1: got me looking into the stuff that led to the
Speaker 1: writing of this episode. We're going to be going back
Speaker 1: in time from this point, but I wanted to start
Speaker 1: kind of at the end because we're going to explain
Speaker 1: why this is a thing, right, Why there is such
Speaker 1: an industry for quack medicine like this that promises to
Speaker 1: deal with whatever learning disability or condition your child has
Speaker 1: by giving them dangerous, absolutely scientifically unverifiable interventions. And if
Speaker 1: I had to name the root cause of all of this,
Speaker 1: it would be the fact that autism has, for the
Speaker 1: most of the time that it has been in use
Speaker 1: as a diagnostic term, been considered like a disease, right,
Speaker 1: like an illness, and generally a life ruining one. Right.
Speaker 1: And I need to separate here the diagnost term autism
Speaker 1: from what we know today as autism, because they're very
Speaker 1: different things. As I said, in our episodes, we did
Speaker 1: some episodes on a guy named Bruno Bettelheim, who is
Speaker 1: a pioneering quack in the child development in child abuse fields.
Speaker 1: In the thirties and forties, every child who didn't behave
Speaker 1: in accordance with the desires of adults at the time
Speaker 1: was labeled as autistic. Now, there were other labels that
Speaker 1: they used. The terms psychotic and schizophrenic were used interchangeably
Speaker 1: with autism in diagnoses of kids who had basically any
Speaker 1: kind of behavioral issue up until the nineteen eighties, which
Speaker 1: is when we started to gain a better understanding of
Speaker 1: what those terms mean.
Speaker 3: Until the nineteen eighties, Yeah, that's crazy.
Speaker 1: And like you will hear childhood like psychosis used interchangeably
Speaker 1: with autism a bunch in the mid century. And the
Speaker 1: actual facts of the matter is that what we now
Speaker 1: call autism, we know actually makes you less likely to
Speaker 1: develop schizophrenia, although we really don't know why, right, it's
Speaker 1: just kind of like the data suggests that people who
Speaker 1: have been diagnosed with autism have lower rates of schizophrenia
Speaker 1: than kind of the general population. But it shows how
Speaker 1: off base people were about the basics of this stuff
Speaker 1: for a very long time. And you could view the
Speaker 1: change that occurred in the nineteen eighties as broadly positive,
Speaker 1: which is autism stops being seen as you know, basically
Speaker 1: childhood psychosis, and starts being seen as a disorder of development.
Speaker 1: So it's no longer being treated as a psychiatric illness,
Speaker 1: which means the parents of these kids start to deal
Speaker 1: with a lot less stigma. And the fact that there
Speaker 1: was stigma to begin with does go back to our
Speaker 1: friend Bruno Bettelheim, who had argued that quote unquote, refrigerator moms,
Speaker 1: cold mothers caused autism, Like if your mom isn't nice
Speaker 1: enough to you, that's how you get autism. Not the truth.
Speaker 1: But this also goes back deeper to Sigmund and Anna Freud,
Speaker 1: who had positive view of mental illness that often blamed
Speaker 1: the actions of the parents from most problems in children.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: In other words, they weren't seeing a lot of this
Speaker 1: as like genetic is just kind of structural or chemical.
Speaker 1: They were seeing this as your mom or dad fuck up,
Speaker 1: and so you wind up with whatever illness. Right, And
Speaker 1: so there was a deep stigma if you were a
Speaker 1: parent with a kid who had any kind of developmental
Speaker 1: disorder or illness, that you had done something to cause it, right,
Speaker 1: which is obviously very bad for parents and not any
Speaker 1: better for children. And one of the results of this
Speaker 1: is that once stuff starts to change, this first generation
Speaker 1: of parents who are starting to get closer to correct
Speaker 1: diagnoses when their kids get diagnosed with autism also were
Speaker 1: generally raised in a culture where parents have usually been
Speaker 1: blamed for what happened to their kids in this way,
Speaker 1: and that's starting to change. But they still have this
Speaker 1: deeply rooted desire to prove I'm not why this happened, right,
Speaker 1: It's a huge part of the story that we're going
Speaker 1: to tell.
Speaker 3: I mean, that still must be the case. Sorry, Like,
Speaker 3: there's so many like high performing perfectionists, like parents who
Speaker 3: have kids who who are autistic, and like one, they
Speaker 3: don't want to believe their kids are autistic for a
Speaker 3: very long time, right, they don't see it in front
Speaker 3: of them, but the but that sense that you can
Speaker 3: fix it or cure it, like is so desperate and
Speaker 3: for so many of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's we're going to talk about that.
Speaker 1: And it's also just the fact that at this point
Speaker 1: in time, when kids get diagnosed with autism, they are
Speaker 1: generally people. They're generally kids who they number one have
Speaker 1: other things going on. There are different kinds of developmental
Speaker 1: disorders and even physical disabilities that sometimes happen alongside autism.
Speaker 1: It's like not necessarily a causitive effect, but like they're correlated.
Speaker 1: And most people who we would understand today as having
Speaker 1: autism aren't being diagnosed with it, right, because most people
Speaker 1: who have autism are generally able to still live independent,
Speaker 1: normal lives, but most people who are getting diagnosed with
Speaker 1: it in these days aren't. So there's also that attitude that, like,
Speaker 1: this is this is a life ruiner, right, That's how
Speaker 1: a lot of and I'm not saying anything bad about
Speaker 1: like people who do have more severe disorders or that
Speaker 1: like life ruining is a good way to talk about that,
Speaker 1: but that's how people are talking about it in this
Speaker 1: period of time. So there's both this stigma and this
Speaker 1: incredible fear around it, and there's also this attitude. It
Speaker 1: started to change the idea that the parent has to
Speaker 1: be to blame, but there's still this very American attitude
Speaker 1: that someone has to be to blame, right, And all
Speaker 1: of these different factors are the real root of the
Speaker 1: biomedical movement that brings us in the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: To RFK Junior and that five year old kid burning
Speaker 1: to death in a hyperbaric tube. And you know, I
Speaker 1: think I should also state here that increasing numbers of
Speaker 1: people do not think it's responsible or good to talk
Speaker 1: about autism as a disability or as like a disorder.
Speaker 1: It's just kind of a way people are and I
Speaker 1: tend to think there's a lot to that attitude. But again,
Speaker 1: part of the issue is that a lot of the
Speaker 1: people getting diagnosed in this period of time have other
Speaker 1: stuff going on and have a lot of very severe problems.
Speaker 1: When I was working in special ed, all of our
Speaker 1: kids were just describing me as kids with autism, but
Speaker 1: they were all they all had a lot of severe issues.
Speaker 1: I'm not just and I'm talking about like a lot
Speaker 1: of them were quadriplegics because of birth defects. A lot
Speaker 1: of them had like a lack of oxygen to the brain.
Speaker 1: And so these were kids who, I mean, we dealt
Speaker 1: with Grandma seizures every single day. These were kids who
Speaker 1: were often very sick and often in a lot of pain.
Speaker 1: And that is a lot to a lot of people's
Speaker 1: understanding of the I'm just what autism is, right, which
Speaker 1: is not accurate. Right. One of the things that we
Speaker 1: have learned over the years. When I was teaching, and
Speaker 1: this is close to twenty years ago, I think the
Speaker 1: understanding was that something like a third of people with
Speaker 1: autism had average or above average IQs. And every few
Speaker 1: years that number has leapt up to the point that
Speaker 1: now it looks like sixty percent or more. And I'm
Speaker 1: sure the number, I'm sure it's basically the same distribution
Speaker 1: as the normal population. And I'm not trying to reduce
Speaker 1: everything to IQ But again, initially, the people getting diagnosed
Speaker 1: and so are understanding of what autism is is deeply
Speaker 1: skewed by the fact that most people who have it
Speaker 1: are just sort of like still living in like not
Speaker 1: getting a diagnosis and going about their day. Right. The
Speaker 1: fact of the matter is that like David Byrne and
Speaker 1: David Lynch were never formally diagnosed with autism.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, No, I mean there's a there's an article,
Speaker 3: like an opinions piece in the New York Times this
Speaker 3: week from the editor of the journal Science who has
Speaker 3: you know that he figured out he had autism at
Speaker 3: age fifty three and was talking about how, like, you know,
Speaker 3: it's made him so much better of a scientist and
Speaker 3: he sees things that other people don't. But also that
Speaker 3: late understanding that like he's in this field and didn't
Speaker 3: realize that that he had autism until such a late period.
Speaker 1: And that's I think that's like the again increasingly the
Speaker 1: way it seemed today and probably the right way to
Speaker 1: look at it is that like, yeah, some people, it's
Speaker 1: a different way of being a person. You're not like
Speaker 1: it's not the same way everyone is, but like it's
Speaker 1: not like an inherently like bad or deleterious thing. It's
Speaker 1: just you're different. And so there are different ways that
Speaker 1: you're going to interact with and view the world and
Speaker 1: different things that are going to work when like we're
Speaker 1: talking about educating people with autism, and again, our understanding
Speaker 1: of this is still very much developing, but it's in
Speaker 1: a very primitive state in the eighties and nineties. Right now,
Speaker 1: people do know Asperger syndrome is a topic of discussion
Speaker 1: by this time, and like the eighties and such, and
Speaker 1: so there is an understanding that like some of these
Speaker 1: kids are like, you know, it's this idea that like
Speaker 1: some of them get superpowers, right, which is not really
Speaker 1: an accurate way to view it. But like some we
Speaker 1: do know that, like there are people with autism who
Speaker 1: are like super like, highly intelligent and capable in specific areas.
Speaker 1: But the general understanding, if you get this, is that
Speaker 1: your kid is never going to live a quote unquote
Speaker 1: normal life. Right, That's how people talk about it. So
Speaker 1: if you're keeping track in the late eighties and early nineties,
Speaker 1: you've got a couple of things coming together. You have
Speaker 1: a generation of parents who are still used to and
Speaker 1: traumatized by the thought of being aimed for their kid's condition,
Speaker 1: who are also used to seeing autism depicted as a
Speaker 1: fate worse than death. Feeding into this complex churn is
Speaker 1: the fact that as the term autism grows to encompass
Speaker 1: more people, it loses what author and doctor Michael Fitzpatrick
Speaker 1: describes as a sense of coherence. Michael wrote a great
Speaker 1: book about the biomedical movement titled Defeating Autism A Damaging Delusion,
Speaker 1: and in it he writes the autistic spectrum stretched from
Speaker 1: children who are nonverbal to severely disabled, to those who
Speaker 1: are of high intelligence but behave strangely and had no friends.
Speaker 1: The spectrum included children with Rehet syndrome, a neurodegenitive disorder
Speaker 1: with an identified genetic cause with fairly superficial similarities to autism.
Speaker 1: It also included children with atypical autism or in the USA,
Speaker 1: pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, a label that merely
Speaker 1: exposed the incoherence of the diagnostic framework. As one authority commented,
Speaker 1: any classification system that includes atypical versions of one entity
Speaker 1: as a separate diagnosable entity all its own has to
Speaker 1: be next to useless as the base scientific progress, which
Speaker 1: is a really good point, Like there's this thing, and
Speaker 1: also the opposite is also the thing, Like it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe we didn't have it right. Maybe that's not a
Speaker 1: super useful term to be the describing ass. You know,
Speaker 1: stuff like this is a moving target, and it's both
Speaker 1: worth acknowledging, like the harm that the fact that this
Speaker 1: is deeply incomplete and fucked up has on a lot
Speaker 1: of kids and parents at this time, and also, well,
Speaker 1: you were never going to get this right straight away.
Speaker 1: So the confusion here is the final ingredient to what
Speaker 1: comes next. The unorthodox biomedical movement, which is how Fitzpatrick
Speaker 1: describes this movement that kind of terminates in that five
Speaker 1: year old in the tube starts with parents who are
Speaker 1: angry and shocked that their kids are as they see
Speaker 1: it broken, and they're also angry and scared of the
Speaker 1: thought of being blamed themselves. The clinical definition is flawed,
Speaker 1: and this produces the opportunity for them to question it,
Speaker 1: starting with rejection of the idea that autism is quote
Speaker 1: purely genetic. Now, if you remember, guys like Bettelheim had
Speaker 1: argued for years that autism was caused by refrigerator moms,
Speaker 1: while science had increasingly come to the conclusion that the
Speaker 1: roots of autism were largely genetic. Now, no one ever
Speaker 1: argued that was the whole story. And in fact, an
Speaker 1: interesting thing about autism is that identical twins. In cases
Speaker 1: of identical twins both only have autism about ninety percent
Speaker 1: of the time, which means there's some degree of and
Speaker 1: when we say environment, that means something other than genetics
Speaker 1: that's playing a role. Right. Fitzpatrick succinctly summarizes what happened next.
Speaker 1: The biomedical activists emphasize environmental rather than the constitutional factors
Speaker 1: in the causation of autism, which they insist as a biomedical,
Speaker 1: metabolic or immune system disorder. While some activists seek to
Speaker 1: redefine autism as a form of mercury poisoning or as
Speaker 1: the result of some process of vaccine injury, others regard
Speaker 1: it as primarily a gastro inter aloge disorder. To reject
Speaker 1: the focus of the autism mainstream on genetic research, demanding
Speaker 1: the redeployment of funds into the study of putative environmental factors,
Speaker 1: and some of this is like a pride thing where
Speaker 1: they're like, if it's genetic, that means it's my fault again,
Speaker 1: which is like not how you should look at that,
Speaker 1: but people do too often. And yeah, so we're going
Speaker 1: to be focusing on like the bastards and the quack
Speaker 1: experts kind of at the core of this movement, but
Speaker 1: we're also going to talk about a lot of these activists.
Speaker 1: I don't want to act like that's the only division
Speaker 1: happening here, though from the flawed state of affairs in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen nineties, you also have like, that's not
Speaker 1: the only thing happening within kind of the community of
Speaker 1: people with autism. In the early nineteen nineties, you start
Speaker 1: to have the first neurodiversity activists, and these are people
Speaker 1: like Jim Sinclaire, who was a man with autism who
Speaker 1: wrote in nineteen ninety three this kind of very beautiful
Speaker 1: piece in which he talked about, like, I understand why
Speaker 1: parents might mourn not having the child they had expect
Speaker 1: to have. But then he went on to write, quote,
Speaker 1: we need and deserve families who can see us and
Speaker 1: value us for ourselves, not families whose vision of us
Speaker 1: is obscured by the ghosts of children who never lived.
Speaker 1: Grieve if you must, for your own lost dreams, but
Speaker 1: don't mourn for us. We are alive, we are real,
Speaker 1: and we're here waiting for you. And I yeah, we're
Speaker 1: not going to talk about that side of the story enough.
Speaker 1: Because this is a podcast about bad people. I thought
Speaker 1: it would be an error not to include that.
Speaker 3: Really beautiful actually, like, yeah, you think about these parents. Obviously,
Speaker 3: they spend so much time warning the kids that they
Speaker 3: thought they'd have right.
Speaker 1: Right, and trying to fix them that they're not. Actually
Speaker 1: they're engaging with appreciating and raising their child.
Speaker 3: I mean, you need like kids who don't play like
Speaker 3: the high school jock who's like, kid doesn't play soccer
Speaker 3: as well as he does or whatever, right, like, and
Speaker 3: you think about the difference between you know, that expectation
Speaker 3: versus someone severely autistic.
Speaker 1: It this thing that happened, and it's the So much
Speaker 1: of the root of the modern fascist movement is like
Speaker 1: the parental rights movement quote unquote, which is really just
Speaker 1: people who want to have this ancient Roman understanding of
Speaker 1: like I get to choose exactly who my kid becomes,
Speaker 1: and no, you don't, no one ever has. That's not
Speaker 1: how people are. Like you're gonna have a kid, you
Speaker 1: really need to accept that they're just gonna do whatever.
Speaker 3: Your kids zero.
Speaker 1: You cannot make them into a specific You can if
Speaker 1: you're generally you can make sure that like they're not
Speaker 1: like a murderer or a horrible criminal. Like that's really
Speaker 1: your goal is making sure they have like empathy and
Speaker 1: like the ability to understand how to survive in the world.
Speaker 3: That's it. Well, you should teach them to scrub a
Speaker 3: computer early imagine you.
Speaker 1: Gotta teach them to be those files. My god, come
Speaker 1: on now, So we're not anyway, we're not gonna be
Speaker 1: talked about the Jimsenclaires and like the neurodiversity movement nearly
Speaker 1: enough in here, but I wanted to kind of bring
Speaker 1: that side of it into this because it would be
Speaker 1: irresponsible not to. Now let's get back to the cranks,
Speaker 1: you know first, But first, you know it was not
Speaker 1: a crank our sponsors. Ah, we're back boy. I love
Speaker 1: that hyperbaric chamber. At I was thinking these things were
Speaker 1: death traps until they said fifteen percent of where whatever
Speaker 1: the fuck you want.
Speaker 3: Let's use the code yeah polyester.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 1: One of the first and most important organizations in this
Speaker 1: history is the Autism Research Institute, which was founded in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven and through its long life has effectively
Speaker 1: been a couple of different kinds of organization. But in
Speaker 1: its early days, at the start, it was founded by
Speaker 1: a doctor named Bernard Rimland. Rimland was a research psychologist
Speaker 1: with a son who was diagnosed with autism back in
Speaker 1: like the fifties, right when it was blamed on cold
Speaker 1: and distant refrigerator moms. Now, Rimland is not a sympathetic
Speaker 1: character in this story. He's a bad guy, but he
Speaker 1: comes from a sympathetic start, which is that his son
Speaker 1: gets diagnosed with autism, which is blamed on the mom
Speaker 1: being cold, and he's like, that's not my wife, right,
Speaker 1: Like this this is not on her, and he's right,
Speaker 1: not on his wife. Yeah, she was a loving mother,
Speaker 1: I'm sure. And so he comes to the very reasonable
Speaker 1: belief that, like, well, then that's obviously this doesn't explain autism.
Speaker 1: We're wrong about what this is. Unfortunately, he decides that
Speaker 1: autism is caused by biomechanical issues triggered by what he
Speaker 1: termed environmental assaults. And this is what this is the
Speaker 1: core of the anti VAXX movement, right, this is the
Speaker 1: birth of it, the very before they're really even focusing
Speaker 1: as much on that. Just this understanding that this is
Speaker 1: something environmental has fucked with my kid, and that's why
Speaker 1: they've got this, right, that's where it all starts. And
Speaker 1: Rimlin is a big anti vax guy, but that's like
Speaker 1: the origin of it. Now again in this in the
Speaker 1: initial era sixty seven, he's not being a crank for
Speaker 1: theorizing this because we don't know anything, right, and some
Speaker 1: of his observations are accurate. The issue is that Rimlin
Speaker 1: continued to hold to his belief about environmental contagions long
Speaker 1: after the evidence put light to that. In between serving
Speaker 1: as the technical advisor on the nineteen eighty eight film Rainman,
Speaker 1: he concluded that vaccines were the quote prime suspect as
Speaker 1: the cause of autism due to the inclusion of a
Speaker 1: mercury based preservative known as Theomersaul. So again, this is
Speaker 1: the Rainman guy. And in nineteen ninety five, the Autism
Speaker 1: Research Institute launched a program known as Defeat Autism Now
Speaker 1: exclamation Point or just DAN with an exclamation point. That
Speaker 1: exclamation point is critical. It's always used in there and autocorrect.
Speaker 1: What's me to have the next word be a new sentence?
Speaker 1: Which is very annoying for me. So Dan's goal is
Speaker 1: to put together parents with physicians and researchers to collectively
Speaker 1: explore new treatments and cures with the ultimate goal of
Speaker 1: defeating autism, a condition that cannot be defeated, because again,
Speaker 1: it's just the way they are. I am not going
Speaker 1: to make that point every time this comes up, but
Speaker 1: I do feel the need to emphasize it here at
Speaker 1: the jump. So DAN is the tumor which would eventually
Speaker 1: metastasize into our entire fantasy medicine industrial complex, which itself
Speaker 1: is a major booster and contributor to the modern fascist movement.
Speaker 1: You can tie the presidency of Donald Trump directly to
Speaker 1: this organization and the things that inculcated in our society.
Speaker 1: So the physicians who are interested in DAN were not,
Speaker 1: as a rule, people in the I don't know how
Speaker 1: else to pronounce it.
Speaker 3: Every time you say it, I was thinking about the
Speaker 3: exclamation points. I'm glad you're also making the audience the comment.
Speaker 5: It's also going to really be a jolt for editor.
Speaker 1: So the physicians who were interested in DAN were not,
Speaker 1: as a rule, people of the prime of their career,
Speaker 1: functioning within their chief area of medical competence. A doctor
Speaker 1: is not a doctor, right. It's one of those things.
Speaker 1: If you've got a doctor who specializes in heart surgery,
Speaker 1: he could be a great heart surgeon. He probably knows
Speaker 1: how to deliver a baby, like intellectually, but he wouldn't
Speaker 1: be your first choice, you know, like again, better than
Speaker 1: a regular dude. Are you treat about doctor? I'm not
Speaker 1: even shitting on doctor. I'm just saying, like, doctors have specialties,
Speaker 1: right of course, because medicine is a big field. Again,
Speaker 1: a guy who's specialty is like you're urinary tract. You
Speaker 1: might not want like examining your eyes because he's not
Speaker 1: an actometrist. Not as specialty. But with stuff like this,
Speaker 1: they function on pot doctor rules, which is, hey, did
Speaker 1: you age ot, are you retired, are you tired of
Speaker 1: being like a family practitioner or whatever? Come into this field.
Speaker 1: Say you're an autism expert. Now you'll get called a
Speaker 1: hero for prescribing anything, and you can keep getting money
Speaker 1: for not actually doing any work. Right now, When young
Speaker 1: medical professionals who have some actual relevant expertise get involved,
Speaker 1: it's generally because they have kids who get diagnosed with autism, right,
Speaker 1: and so some of these people are like psychotherapists, psychiatrists
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. There are some neurologists who get
Speaker 1: involved in this, but for the most part, it's like
Speaker 1: older doctors who are kind of aging out of the
Speaker 1: profession and looking for a grift. You know, again, we
Speaker 1: should have kept the pot doctor system going as like
Speaker 1: a just a way to keep these people off the streets. Right,
Speaker 1: It's like a boys and girls club for old doctors. No, no,
Speaker 1: let them give out pot prescriptions.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So these experts are not mostly doctors though, and in fact,
Speaker 1: among the most influential of them is former school teacher
Speaker 1: Sue Palmer, author of the book Toxic Childhood, published in
Speaker 1: two thousand and six, and she is one of the
Speaker 1: first people to look at this massive surge and diagnoses
Speaker 1: of autism ADHD in other conditions, not as evidence that
Speaker 1: we were beginning to understand these conditions and thus correctly
Speaker 1: recognized how many people had them, but that there had
Speaker 1: been a quote special needs explosion that must have been
Speaker 1: caused by an environmental factor. She believes it's either jug
Speaker 1: food or video games generally, right, these different theories people have.
Speaker 1: Palmer is one of the first experts who lumps autism
Speaker 1: in with ADHD as well as dyspraxia, dyslexia, and several
Speaker 1: other learning disorders. And again, this is why I started
Speaker 1: with the story that kid is not diagnosed with autism,
Speaker 1: it burns to death. He's diagnosed with ADHD. But that
Speaker 1: is a death related to this movement that is sparked
Speaker 1: by fear of autism, right, because they just start lumping
Speaker 1: in with every other thing that we're now diagnosing properly
Speaker 1: more often because they think, wow, so many more kids
Speaker 1: have this. No, probably about the same amount have it
Speaker 1: who always have. We just know what it is now,
Speaker 1: you know. Another biomedical practitioner, Kenneth Bach lumped autism and
Speaker 1: ADHD together with asthma and allergies and labeled them before
Speaker 1: a disorders in both cases, what these people are doing,
Speaker 1: these experts are doing, is mixing autism with things that
Speaker 1: aren't autism in a way that allows practitioners to make
Speaker 1: the case that there's been an explosion in what they
Speaker 1: term developmental disorders. It looks even more stark if you're
Speaker 1: Matt lumping all of these things together as the same
Speaker 1: kind of thing, right, And thus they can make the
Speaker 1: cases that there's a crisis that only bold experimental medicine,
Speaker 1: like they happen to be selling contrite right. In other words,
Speaker 1: by mixing all these things together, they're creating a grouping
Speaker 1: of potential clients that include basically every parent, because almost
Speaker 1: every parent is going to have a kid who has
Speaker 1: one of these things. Right.
Speaker 3: That is incredible, Yeah, such a grift.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's like if you're a mechanic and you're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I deal with I got this great way
Speaker 1: of fixing busted tires and also you know, bad spark plugs,
Speaker 1: bucked up transmissions and yeah, and it's more of being
Speaker 1: an incense stick over your cheek. So bring it in
Speaker 1: as Fitzpatrick, writes Brian Jepson, another defeat autism now practitioner,
Speaker 1: suggests that autism, which characterizes as both an environmental illness
Speaker 1: and a multi organ metabolic disease, has increased because the
Speaker 1: general toxic load in the environment has risen to a
Speaker 1: point where so many of us have reached our genetically
Speaker 1: determined toxic dipping point that the human species has now
Speaker 1: urged edged into a state of what we might call
Speaker 1: a herd vulnerability. Though everybody is considered to be at
Speaker 1: risk from environmental dangers, campaigners believe that children are more
Speaker 1: vulnerable to than adults, and that babies are the most
Speaker 1: vulnerable of all. And this is a quick aside because
Speaker 1: mercury is probably the most common thing people blame for this.
Speaker 1: They took that mercury based preservative out of vaccines in
Speaker 1: like two thousand and one. Rates of autism diagnoses continued
Speaker 1: to rise after we stopped because it didn't It wasn't
Speaker 1: doing anything. It has nothing to do with the vaccines.
Speaker 1: We're just getting better at diagnosing it, all of it.
Speaker 1: Human history has been filled with people with autism, we
Speaker 1: just didn't call it that it is.
Speaker 3: It is amazing that like like obviously like mercury poisoning
Speaker 3: and mad hatters and all the like. You know that
Speaker 3: mercury has effects on Oh yeah, it's.
Speaker 1: It's had back when they put it in the hats.
Speaker 1: It definitely on the population.
Speaker 3: Yes, But we're like we're totally cool with like botox
Speaker 3: being botulism. But yeah, like can't differentiate between like the
Speaker 3: mercury in the vaccine.
Speaker 1: No, it's also like chemicals are bad. But also I'll
Speaker 1: shoot whatever into my kid if a doctor, if a
Speaker 1: fake doctor, says it'll treat their autism. It's like, we're
Speaker 1: scared of vaccines and you're putting these other shit in
Speaker 1: your baby, Like, what is wrong with you?
Speaker 3: I know, I know.
Speaker 1: Now, I think this all kind of helps you explain
Speaker 1: why that little boy with ADHD dying in a hyperbaric
Speaker 1: chamber is relevant this episode. It's unclear when hyperbaric therapy
Speaker 1: first started gaining popularity as and autism treatment, but by
Speaker 1: the late nineties to the early two thousands it was
Speaker 1: well underway as a practice among biomedical experts. That's when
Speaker 1: they start doing this.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 1: The most fucked up part of all of this is
Speaker 1: that hyperbaric therapy is less dangerous than a lot of
Speaker 1: the treatments that get prescribed because there are some potential
Speaker 1: negative consequences when it's done properly right. You can have
Speaker 1: some issues with it because it's super pressurized, but generally
Speaker 1: people are fine after hyperbaric therapy, right, if it's done
Speaker 1: properly right. This is not true of a lot of
Speaker 1: the drug based treatment regimens that develop over the years.
Speaker 1: The first, Yeah.
Speaker 3: When you mentioned h hyperbaric therapy, like, I know there
Speaker 3: are so many like wealthy families sure have like tents
Speaker 3: and stuff in their house and they're trying to reverse
Speaker 3: their kids' autism. And it's like like that, I had
Speaker 3: never heard of the glass tube.
Speaker 1: That is just yeah, fine, it's a nightmare. It's one
Speaker 1: of I know, like Brian Johnson that Lift Forever guy
Speaker 1: does have baric shit, And fine, he's in his late forties,
Speaker 1: he's got five hundred million dollars, he gets to make choice.
Speaker 1: He's more. I believe adults, if you want to put
Speaker 1: yourself in the death chamber and potentially burn to death,
Speaker 1: I don't give a fuck, do it right. And people
Speaker 1: should be allowed to do a heroin if they want to.
Speaker 1: Don't put your five year old. In these things, they
Speaker 1: can't make that choice. So the first of these autism
Speaker 1: drug remedies that that really takes hold is known by
Speaker 1: the incredibly sustnamed Secretin. Now, Secretin is a real thing.
Speaker 1: It's not like some made up bullshit. It's a hormone
Speaker 1: that stimulates the secretion of digestive fluids from the pancreas. Right,
Speaker 1: it's an and giving people that hormone can be useful
Speaker 1: for a number of things. Uh. Part of why they're
Speaker 1: there's there in. It's legitimate researchers who think, well, this
Speaker 1: might be helpful in treating some of the things that
Speaker 1: are correlated with autism, because people with autism often have
Speaker 1: a number of different GI tract issues, right, it's very common.
Speaker 1: I don't know that. I don't think we really know why,
Speaker 1: because again we don't we really have a Still to
Speaker 1: this day, we don't know very much about autism compared
Speaker 1: to like what we would like to know. But this
Speaker 1: is a thing, and so the idea that like, Okay,
Speaker 1: well this hormone that stimulates digestive fluids from the pancreas
Speaker 1: that might help with some of these side issues not
Speaker 1: an unreasonable point. Right, So there's a they carry out
Speaker 1: a test because there's a I think a mom who
Speaker 1: gives some of this to her kid and she claims
Speaker 1: a pretty dramatic effect. So they bring in like two
Speaker 1: other kids and they do like an initial study on
Speaker 1: this stuff. And again just three kids, and this is
Speaker 1: an unblinded study, right, so everyone getting the drug knows
Speaker 1: they're getting the drug, both the researchers and the people
Speaker 1: getting it, which is like, again, if you're kind of
Speaker 1: just housing initially, it's not you shouldn't base anything on this.
Speaker 1: If things have been done properly and they've done this
Speaker 1: first one, then like, okay, maybe we should we need
Speaker 1: to do a blinded study now, which does actually happen.
Speaker 1: If that's all that had happened, I'd say, and nothing wrong.
Speaker 1: You know, you do this first thing that shows there
Speaker 1: might be something to look into. You do a better
Speaker 1: study with more kids that's blinded, next whatever. Unfortunately, the
Speaker 1: media being what it is, always looking for a story,
Speaker 1: and there being a lot of parents with kids who
Speaker 1: are interested in this, immediately run with the whole. There's
Speaker 1: been a miracle chair found. Right as soon as this
Speaker 1: unblinded study comes out and the biomedical treatment activists in
Speaker 1: DAN believe that they're dealing with a calamity. Right to them,
Speaker 1: autism is a disaster that is severe in time sensitive right.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: If you don't really get to fixing this in your
Speaker 1: kid by the time they're three or four, you have
Speaker 1: a ticking clock and they're just going to be fucked forever. Right,
Speaker 1: So you really have to jump out. You can't wait
Speaker 1: for science. Right. And so our friend doctor Rimland, who's
Speaker 1: the founder of DAN, takes out a patent on secretin
Speaker 1: before any other studies are done.
Speaker 3: Sorry, so he gives this past exclamation.
Speaker 1: He takes out a patent on this this this hormone
Speaker 1: as an autism treatment, and he sells it to a
Speaker 1: company called Repligon. Again, so many evil forms what.
Speaker 4: Is happening here?
Speaker 1: And always people like the farmer industry is evil, but
Speaker 1: not repligion, okay, man, No trust his bullishness on this
Speaker 1: hormone is based entirely on one mop this lady Victoria Beck,
Speaker 1: who claims that her child shows dramatic improvement with secret In,
Speaker 1: such improvement that doctor Rimlin describes Secretin as the most
Speaker 1: important development in the history of autism. Months later, in
Speaker 1: the summer of nineteen ninety nine, secretin makes its way
Speaker 1: over to the United Kingdom, where TV news crews film
Speaker 1: a boy with autism before and after Secret and injections,
Speaker 1: showing dramatic change. Now, UK media is not the only
Speaker 1: you know, not alone in this behavior, as writer Nancy
Speaker 1: Schute notes in a piece for Scientific American media outlets
Speaker 1: include in Good Morning America and Ladies Home Journal recounted parents'
Speaker 1: joyous ch tales of children's transformed. Now, as is always
Speaker 1: the case with this, that video was facilitated by a
Speaker 1: shady clinic offering a lot of trendy bullshit medicine. Right,
Speaker 1: that kid who gets filmed is provided with Secret and
Speaker 1: by this clinic that sells nonsense drugs. Per Fitzpatrick's book,
Speaker 1: this course was provided by a private GP who also
Speaker 1: offered treatments for jet lag, chronic fatigue, and aging at
Speaker 1: a cost of fifteen hundred pounds. Oh wow, so this
Speaker 1: is just like a is this thing not regulated yet? Absolutely?
Speaker 1: We'll shoot at India. What fifteen hundred bucks? Did take it?
Speaker 3: Give it?
Speaker 1: Get hand me your kid, I'll shoot them with whatever.
Speaker 3: I love that. I love that cures everything from autism
Speaker 3: to jet lag.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's different, different nonsense drugs, but I
Speaker 1: see so. Unfortunately for Secret and advocates, within six months,
Speaker 1: a double blind study of sixty children had come to
Speaker 1: very different conclude lusions secreting was at best useless. This
Speaker 1: was not a at least for treating autism. This was
Speaker 1: not enough to immediately kill the industry. However, as Nancy
Speaker 1: Shoote writes, by May two thousand and five, five randomized
Speaker 1: clinical trials had failed to provide to reveal any benefit
Speaker 1: an interest in Secret and waned. It took years for
Speaker 1: that to play out, says pediatrician Susan Levy, who helped
Speaker 1: conduct several of the trials. Research is very labor intensive,
Speaker 1: and progress may be slow. Parents may feel helpless, she adds,
Speaker 1: and they don't want to leave any stone unturned. And
Speaker 1: there's like a kind of weird tragedy of commons thing here,
Speaker 1: which is like, if your kid gets diagnosed to the
Speaker 1: thing that we don't understand well how to help with
Speaker 1: or even what it is, you may be best just
Speaker 1: like loving them and trying to help them figure out
Speaker 1: life and waiting for the science to figure stuff out,
Speaker 1: because the alternative is you do what these parents do,
Speaker 1: which is just you shooting random crap into your child
Speaker 1: and I get there. It's the one of the biggest
Speaker 1: problems in like emergency situations. Obviously there's the issue of
Speaker 1: like people just not do the bystander effect, but there's
Speaker 1: also this issue of people feeling like I have to
Speaker 1: do something and then making the problem worse. When you're
Speaker 1: trained in like emergency medicine, one of the first pieces
Speaker 1: of training is like, don't just jump in there.
Speaker 4: You need to.
Speaker 1: Evaluate the scene, because the worst thing you can do
Speaker 1: is try to go be a hero and add a
Speaker 1: casualty to the situation.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: You get like a down power line, the whole family
Speaker 1: dies rushing to save one person, right because they're the
Speaker 1: stress of not doing anything, which is sometimes the best
Speaker 1: thing to do, is really hard. And that's what's going
Speaker 1: on psychologically here too. So you know, by the point
Speaker 1: that we are at now, there have been more than
Speaker 1: a dozen double blind studies that all repeatedly mean the
Speaker 1: same case. Secretin just doesn't work this way. Science and
Speaker 1: the sheer in effectiveness of secretin has eventually brought it
Speaker 1: to I don't think it's entirely extinct, but it's it's
Speaker 1: not as common as it once was. But obviously a
Speaker 1: lot of parent children are drugged and thankfully the side
Speaker 1: effects of this aren't as bad as the next thing
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about, But their parents are robbed blind. Right,
Speaker 1: this is not cheap. Michael Fitzpatrick, himself a physician, writes this.
Speaker 1: One day in surgery, the mother of a boy with
Speaker 1: autism told me that she had spent the equivalent of
Speaker 1: his disability living allowance for one year on a course
Speaker 1: of secret and injections provided at a Harley Street clinic for
Speaker 1: a single parent reliant on benefits. The outcome of this
Speaker 1: encounter with a biomedical practitioner was not only disappointment when
Speaker 1: the miracle cure failed, but financial hardship for the whole family.
Speaker 1: And obviously these people don't care. They're lefting all the
Speaker 1: way to the bank. They don't give a shit if
Speaker 1: any of this works.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's horrifying.
Speaker 1: And it's gonna get worse because again, at least secret
Speaker 1: and doesn't seem to really fuck people up too much. Right,
Speaker 1: it's just kind of useless. But the next thing is
Speaker 1: not just that, you know what, doesn't have any hype
Speaker 1: to it because it's just that good. Our ads all right,
Speaker 1: everybody back. So all these studies are accumulating in the
Speaker 1: hypover secretin is dying down. The con men offering cures
Speaker 1: to desperate dan parents spun up a new strategy for interventions.
Speaker 1: They had long believed that mercury poisoning was a root
Speaker 1: cause of autism, so of course the logical place to
Speaker 1: look for a potential cure was treatments that could reduce
Speaker 1: the amount of heavy metals in a child's blood. Right,
Speaker 1: If it's metals that are causing it, why don't we
Speaker 1: look at ways to strip heavy metals from somebody's system, right,
Speaker 1: And there is a way to do that. It's called
Speaker 1: chelation therapy, right, like hyperbaric therapy. This is real medicine.
Speaker 1: If you have like lead poisoning, for example, chelation therapy
Speaker 1: can do a lot of good for you, you know.
Speaker 1: And it's basically there's a couple of different drugs that
Speaker 1: could do this. But you dose people with a drug
Speaker 1: and it converts the lead, the mercury, and other heavy
Speaker 1: metals that are in their body into less dangerous compounds
Speaker 1: that you kind of pee out. Right, So it's great
Speaker 1: if you're like a minor who has heavy metal exposure,
Speaker 1: you know, but very few children really do because we
Speaker 1: don't let them work in mines anymore. Give them, give
Speaker 1: give the Republicans a year, we'll get back to. Kids
Speaker 1: with autism very rarely have massive lead levels, you know,
Speaker 1: And if they do, it is generally doesn't have anything
Speaker 1: to do with their autism. It's because they grew up
Speaker 1: in like Flint, Michigan. Right, And maybe then they do
Speaker 1: need chelation therapy. Some kids do, unfortunately, there's a lot.
Speaker 4: Of Michigan's lander in this episode to.
Speaker 5: And in fact they problem it is the birthplace of
Speaker 5: my parents.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well they might need some chelation therapy. I don't know,
Speaker 1: so I won't ask. Is great if you've got heavy
Speaker 1: metal exposure, right, But if you don't, it's harmful because
Speaker 1: the process of like pulling all of these metals out
Speaker 1: of because we all have heavy metals in us all
Speaker 1: the time. Right. Trace levels, it's fine, it's fine. Sometimes
Speaker 1: in some cases you need them, but in other cases
Speaker 1: it's just fine. Right, teeny tiny bit of mercury, very normal.
Speaker 1: Ask people who eat a lot of fish. Right. But
Speaker 1: so if you're doing this, this has an impact on
Speaker 1: your body. This is a drug that has a pretty
Speaker 1: profound effect on you, and that means it does bad stuff.
Speaker 1: And if you have way too much lead or whatever
Speaker 1: in you, it's worth that cost, right because the lead
Speaker 1: has kind of caused problems. But if you don't have
Speaker 1: any problems that are caused by heavy metals, you're gonna
Speaker 1: hurt yourself with this shit for no reason. Now, before
Speaker 1: we get into the use of chellation for autism, I
Speaker 1: wanted to start with I didn't see this in other
Speaker 1: articles on chelation therapy, but I found a two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine piece in Slate by Arthur Allen that talks
Speaker 1: about the starting point of chelation as a snake oil cure,
Speaker 1: and it does start before autism quote, well before it
Speaker 1: was used for autism quote. Chelation therapy became a craze
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties as a treatment for atherosclerosis and adults.
Speaker 1: Opponents claimed patients were being harmed by mercury from their fillings.
Speaker 1: Dentists use this as an excuse to pull teeth and
Speaker 1: even removed jaw bones from their patients. When Haley, a
Speaker 1: University of Kentucky chemist, was the high Priest of the
Speaker 1: Amalgam Wars, when the Thimer assault theory emerged on the scene,
Speaker 1: Hailey and other chelationists shifted their focus to autistic children.
Speaker 1: So again, these are people who are like, yeah, let's
Speaker 1: get with these crank dnnis. Let's put our pulling teeth
Speaker 1: and jaws out of people. Give it them chellation therapy.
Speaker 1: It's your fillings. And then like that kind of dies.
Speaker 1: But then suddenly they see people blaming you know, mercury
Speaker 1: for autism, and they're like, guys, we got a new grift.
Speaker 1: Move on over here, move on over here. These parents
Speaker 1: aren't looking for shit. So in the year two thousand,
Speaker 1: this was still a fairly small number. It was fairly
Speaker 1: uncommon for children with autism to undergo chelation therapy, and
Speaker 1: at least you got some some of the small number
Speaker 1: of kids with autism actually like had heavy metal exposure
Speaker 1: that was unrelated, but you know, might have actually needed chillation.
Speaker 1: By two thousand and five, there were more than ten
Speaker 1: thousand children with autism in the un US regularly undergoing
Speaker 1: chelation therapy. Almost none of them had any reason to do.
Speaker 3: So ten thousand kids.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is like a five year period of
Speaker 1: time from a handful to ten thousand right on a
Speaker 1: regular basis, so unlike secretin, chelation therapy involved dosing children
Speaker 1: with an extraordinarily powerful drug that had dangerous side effects.
Speaker 1: Telation can cause kidney failure, especially if administered in IV form,
Speaker 1: which is exactly what most biomedical experts advised when treating autism.
Speaker 1: The standard of care. You only really use IV if
Speaker 1: you have to. You have other ways. There's like pills,
Speaker 1: I think, there's creams that are less harsh on your body,
Speaker 1: and you can generally do that with people who just
Speaker 1: have heavy metal exposure. For a variety of reasons, including
Speaker 1: to get more money from it. These guys are like, no,
Speaker 1: you got to do an IV right, which we know
Speaker 1: is the most dangerous way to do this.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Chelation therapy can also cause heart problems, which again is poy.
Speaker 1: You don't take this and lets you have to. One
Speaker 1: person who absolutely did not need chelation therapy was Abu
Speaker 1: Bakar Tarik, age five. He was the son of a
Speaker 1: physician in Britain who had been diagnosed with autism. Tarik
Speaker 1: had been Tarik's family described him as a happy and
Speaker 1: energetic boy, but despite this, they also searched desperately to
Speaker 1: cure him, eventually subjecting him to ten different kinds of
Speaker 1: quack medical therapy, including hyperbaric chambers. Now, Fitzpatrick makes this
Speaker 1: incredibly important important note when he writes about this in
Speaker 1: his book quote this is characteristic of the unorthodox biomedical approach,
Speaker 1: which recommends a wide range of interventions which are often
Speaker 1: pursued simultaneously. This makes any judgment of which treatment may
Speaker 1: be working or causing adverse effects impossible. And again, it's
Speaker 1: one of those things. You're a parent, You're terrified. You
Speaker 1: want everything, give him everything, But like that's not how
Speaker 1: medicine works. If you give him everything, you don't know
Speaker 1: what's working or not. Right, there's a reason why you're like, well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna try one thing, we'll see what happens, then
Speaker 1: we'll try another, you know, because otherwise it's not satisfying.
Speaker 1: But you just can't do it the other way.
Speaker 3: Right, It's like an old sailor saying, right, like, if
Speaker 3: you can't tie, could not tie a lot of bad ones. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: it feels it feels like that, but but I mean
Speaker 3: I was just thinking about like the the iv aspect
Speaker 3: of it, Like IVY looks like the most scientific of
Speaker 3: those things, right, Like prescribe you to cream like.
Speaker 1: This is a serious medicine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, happens.
Speaker 1: It's just more dangerous for your again small child.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, none of these interventions are based in sound
Speaker 1: medical science or any scientists at all, science at all,
Speaker 1: and they don't work. So Tarik's family as they're trying,
Speaker 1: they're putting them in hyperbaric chambers and shit. They continue
Speaker 1: to shop around for experts and diagnoses, and eventually they
Speaker 1: find themselves leaving the UK, crossing the Pond to seek
Speaker 1: treatment in the United States, which is how they wind
Speaker 1: up seeking out doctor andju Usman, director of the True
Speaker 1: Health Medical Center in Naperville, Illinois. Now, doctor Usman happily
Speaker 1: diagnosed Tarik with heavy heavy metal poisoning. Specifically, she blamed
Speaker 1: his case of autism on very high aluminum levels. Now,
Speaker 1: actual blood tests didn't support this. He had low levels
Speaker 1: of iron. He did have a slightly elevated lead level,
Speaker 1: although we'll talk about why it's not because he necessarily
Speaker 1: had normally a high lead level. There's no evidence that
Speaker 1: his aluminum levels were raised at all. We don't really
Speaker 1: know why she came to this conclusion, but still he
Speaker 1: was prescribed an extensive series of chillation treatments which would
Speaker 1: ultimately end in his death. Now, doctor anju Usman is
Speaker 1: the still to this day, as far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: the director of the True Health Medical Center, which brags
Speaker 1: on its website to have provided integrative and biomedical treatments
Speaker 1: that enhance traditional medical care since two thousand and three.
Speaker 1: Her bio on the website says that she got her
Speaker 1: degree from Indiana from Indiana University Medical School and carried
Speaker 1: out a residency at a family practice in Cook County Hospital, Chicago.
Speaker 1: She writes, during residency, I had my first daughter who
Speaker 1: had severe food allergies in asthma. My second doctor, who
Speaker 1: was born shortly after, was diagnosed with juvenile onset diabetes.
Speaker 1: My third daughter had chemical sensibilities to environmental substances like
Speaker 1: cleaning agents, perfumes, pesticides, and synthetic clothing. Even with my
Speaker 1: extensive education and training, I felt ill equipped to handle
Speaker 1: their medical issues. I began questioning my role as a
Speaker 1: physician and healer. As she that's obviously a difficult situation.
Speaker 1: It's never I was a sick kid with horrible asthma.
Speaker 1: I have sympathy for that. It's scary, right, She claims
Speaker 1: this experience as a mother led her to shift her
Speaker 1: attention to treating the underlying cause of the disorders rather
Speaker 1: than the symptoms. And again she talks about her extensive education.
Speaker 1: None of it isn't doing this. Being a family practitioner
Speaker 1: does not treat like teach you how.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure, as boss.
Speaker 1: You know, that's just not how it works. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's like you know, I'm an expert race car driver,
Speaker 1: which is how I know how to drive an eighteen
Speaker 1: wheeler for thirty seven hours. Like, No, there's a different skills.
Speaker 1: There's maybe some ways in which they correlate, but honestly,
Speaker 1: I would prefer a truck driver do that job. She
Speaker 1: worked as an alternative health clinic called the Fifer Medical
Speaker 1: Center in Warrenville, which was named after Carl Fifer, a
Speaker 1: researcher who the CIA had paid to carry out LSD
Speaker 1: mind control studies as part of MK Ultra. So great
Speaker 1: namesake for the Fighters Medical Center. No notes.
Speaker 4: Cool.
Speaker 1: I will say doctor Usman's children's allergies were more significant
Speaker 1: even than she writes on her bio for the center,
Speaker 1: And I'm not blaming her for that. I understand why,
Speaker 1: because her three daughters all suffered severe allergic disorders. One
Speaker 1: had conjunctive itis so bad it caused cellulitis in her eyes,
Speaker 1: and her eldest daughter, Priya, died in two thousand and three,
Speaker 1: two years before Treik came to her clinic after an
Speaker 1: anaphylactic reaction to peanuts. So what we've got here is
Speaker 1: a legitimately draumatized mother who was trained in medical science,
Speaker 1: but like not the kind she's got to be practicing,
Speaker 1: and she can't really accept that sometimes horrible things happen
Speaker 1: to your kids and that sucks. So she goes on
Speaker 1: a crusade after concluding that aluminum toxicity causes everything from
Speaker 1: allergies to autism, and.
Speaker 3: So she's just like over prescribing for everyone to save
Speaker 3: every kid. Essentially.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's kind of what's going on.
Speaker 3: It comes from a good place.
Speaker 1: It comes from like I understand how you got here,
Speaker 1: but you are just going to compound harm, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it feels like a different type of
Speaker 3: horrible than like the person who is sending text messages about.
Speaker 1: The right right right, get as many bodies in these shape.
Speaker 1: Although actually she has Ah, She's got a sketchy history
Speaker 1: with hyperbaric chambers. We'll talk about that. So Uzman was
Speaker 1: a member of DAN and a fellow DAN doctor Kenneth
Speaker 1: Bach agreed with her about aluminum. He has noted that
Speaker 1: he's disappointed that she hasn't really published much of anything
Speaker 1: about her findings on aluminum, which I suspect is because
Speaker 1: there aren't in a bio for her clinic. Doctor Usman
Speaker 1: engages in common bio medical practitioner tactics of blumping every
Speaker 1: issue she can name together and insinuating, hey, these all
Speaker 1: might be caused by the same environmental toxin, which in
Speaker 1: her case is aluminum poison. Quote. I wanted to know
Speaker 1: more about why my children and so many other children
Speaker 1: and adults and epidemic proportions are suffering from chronic degenerative
Speaker 1: autoimmune disorders such as asthma, allergies, arthritis, diabetes, OCD, mood disorders,
Speaker 1: attention deficit disorder ADHD, and autism spectrum disorders. Now, like
Speaker 1: a lot of these people, doctor Usmann considers ADHD to
Speaker 1: be part of the autism spectrum. Again, mainstream medical science
Speaker 1: doesn't really feel this way. On True Medical's website, she
Speaker 1: provides us with a clear idea of how she interpeers
Speaker 1: view people with autism. Quote, the mission in opening True
Speaker 1: Health Medical Center came from my journey to help my
Speaker 1: own children with these chronic disorders to lead productive and
Speaker 1: healthy lives. This simple dream has been shattered for so
Speaker 1: many families. Right, It's again this idea nobody with autism,
Speaker 1: no kid can ever live like a happy life. Maybe
Speaker 1: if you weren't drugging them more, would I don't know
Speaker 1: if Tarik Nadama would have ever been productive in like
Speaker 1: the capitalist sense of the word. But again, his family
Speaker 1: described them as a happy, energetic child, so at least
Speaker 1: that was in the cards for him until quack biomedical
Speaker 1: treatments killed him. As I explained last episode, doctor Usman
Speaker 1: had diagnosed him with heavy metal toxicity, despite there being
Speaker 1: very little evidence that we have that that was the case. Now,
Speaker 1: one widespread belief among parents in this community is that
Speaker 1: by the time a kid is three or four, you
Speaker 1: don't have much time to reverse the damage that they
Speaker 1: believe causes autism. So time is of the essence, which
Speaker 1: is why you have this shotgun approach to extreme therapies.
Speaker 1: One of my sources for these episodes was a Chicago
Speaker 1: Tribune article which quotes DAN affiliated pediatrician doctor Elizabeth Mumper
Speaker 1: when she testified before federal court that quote, we feel
Speaker 1: some urgency that we can't wait for ten or twenty years,
Speaker 1: and that urgency is what leads to treatments like this.
Speaker 1: So doctor Usman recommends Tarik undergo EDTA therapy, which is
Speaker 1: like a type of drug you could do chillation with.
Speaker 1: The treatment is administered by a different doctor at the center,
Speaker 1: named Roy Carrey. Roy is again a retired E and
Speaker 1: T surgeon, so none of this is within what you'd
Speaker 1: call his wheelhouse. In two thousand and five, doctor Carrey
Speaker 1: was sixty eight, he was not yet a listed DAN practitioner.
Speaker 1: He did the year after Tarik died complete the intensive
Speaker 1: eight hour training necessary to get that requirement, so that's good.
Speaker 1: Tariq was his first time administering chillation therapy to a
Speaker 1: child with autism. Now, doctor Usmont's website includes this very
Speaker 1: friendly photo of her looking like a lovely, competent family doctor.
Speaker 1: And I want you to see this picture that she
Speaker 1: puts on her website. As I read this description of
Speaker 1: the therapy that she endorsed and that doctor carry carried
Speaker 1: out on young Tarik, I'm going to quote from Michael
Speaker 1: Fitzpatrick's book here, Tariq's records indicate that to administer an
Speaker 1: intravenous infusion he had to be restrained by at least
Speaker 1: four adults using a papoose board. This device is a
Speaker 1: flat wooden board with attached fabric straps which are wrapped
Speaker 1: around the child's body and limbs to prevent struggling during treatment.
Speaker 1: It was obviously impossible to restrain Toreek for the period
Speaker 1: of several hours generally recommended for the chellation infusion, hence,
Speaker 1: in contravention of specific cautions issued by the manufacturer to
Speaker 1: reek suitably restrained receive this medication over five to ten
Speaker 1: minutes in a rapid IV. Push. Oh wow, So they
Speaker 1: are strapping him to a board, holding him down, and
Speaker 1: instead of again the safest ways like do a pill
Speaker 1: or a cream, the least safe way is an IV.
Speaker 1: But when you're even doing an IV, it should take
Speaker 1: hours because you don't want to do this too fast.
Speaker 1: They are shotgunning hours worth of medication into his body
Speaker 1: and fi his five year old body in five to
Speaker 1: ten minutes while he's strapped to a board. So we
Speaker 1: have known for a long time that This is bad
Speaker 1: right doing DTA. Even if you do it properly, you
Speaker 1: can people can develop irregular heart rhythms and have seizures
Speaker 1: or even die. This is why the standard of care
Speaker 1: is a slow IVY infusion. But because this kid doesn't
Speaker 1: like being strapped to a board and shut up with drugs,
Speaker 1: they do the most dangerous version of the thing and
Speaker 1: he undergoes this three times. Tarik finally dies after his
Speaker 1: third infusion. Doctor Carrie wasn't even in the room. He
Speaker 1: gets bored and he leaves it up to another doctor
Speaker 1: and a nurse to do this.
Speaker 3: He gets bored of the short procedure.
Speaker 1: He doesn't describe it as getting bored. That's my editorializing,
Speaker 1: but like he didn't want to be there. You know,
Speaker 1: he's sixty eight whatever, He's on a boat or some shit.
Speaker 1: Per his medical records, Tarik's released during a subsequent lawsuit.
Speaker 1: During the IV push, Tarik's mother, Marwan Nadama, said that
Speaker 1: something was wrong. Doctor Mark Lewis took Tarik's vitals and
Speaker 1: then Tariq went limp. Nurse Teresa Bicker called nine to
Speaker 1: one one and helped with CPR while the ambulance was
Speaker 1: en route. Tarik was taken by ambulance to Butler Regional Hospital,
Speaker 1: where he was pronounced dead.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, it's just so it's so horrifying that
Speaker 3: like the treatment itself is horrible, and then you're shotgunning
Speaker 3: the treatment and then and this kid is like, uh,
Speaker 3: strapped down and there aren't professionals there. Like the fact
Speaker 3: that there.
Speaker 1: I mean there's a doctor and a nurse there, but
Speaker 1: like they're not doing what they should be.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you had anyone whose expertise was in chulation therapy,
Speaker 1: they'd be like, what the fuck are you doing? This
Speaker 1: isn't a wee do. If you're gonna give him this,
Speaker 1: don't give him this. But if you are, like him
Speaker 1: a pill.
Speaker 3: Fuck yeah. So.
Speaker 1: A forensic pathologist later identified Juick's cause of death as
Speaker 1: diffuse acute cerebral hypoxic a shimic injury, and sub indo
Speaker 1: cardial myocardial necrosis. Carrie was ultimately charged with involuntary manslaughter.
Speaker 1: He surrendered his medical license in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: but the charges were dropped, although in the December of
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, his license was suspended for six
Speaker 1: months over the incident and he was placed on a
Speaker 1: two year probation. So that's where we're in Nick part one.
Speaker 3: I have to say, uh, I mean, this is the
Speaker 3: most I've smiled in an episode about children dying. It's
Speaker 3: so sad.
Speaker 1: How else do you fucking I don't know.
Speaker 3: Deal with this.
Speaker 5: It's awful that you yelling Dan is funny every time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it does. I really knew that that was going
Speaker 1: to be a load bearing part of getting people through
Speaker 1: these episodes.
Speaker 4: It's been very helpful to me personally.
Speaker 1: Me too, Mago.
Speaker 4: You have anything you want to plug before the end
Speaker 4: of part one.
Speaker 3: You know, we also talk about terrible things, but are
Speaker 3: terrible things on part are more like the sunniest place
Speaker 3: to hide your taxes or or like uh, why iron
Speaker 3: Rand took Social Security and was a total hypocrite and
Speaker 3: stuff like that. But it's uh, I don't know. If
Speaker 3: I would love for people to check out the show. Yeah,
Speaker 3: listen to.
Speaker 5: The Michelin star episode that you guys did when you
Speaker 5: brought the show back recently, Like I don't know, it
Speaker 5: was like a year ago maybe, yeah, Yeah, that was
Speaker 5: a fun one for me.
Speaker 3: We did a really fun one recently on Pablo Xcobar,
Speaker 3: the guy who was stealing rare bird eggs.
Speaker 5: That's fun. That's great. I love that, Robert. We should
Speaker 5: we go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's let's get the fuck out.
Speaker 4: Of here, all right. That's part one. Behind the Bastards
Speaker 4: is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from
Speaker 4: cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com,
Speaker 4: or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 4: or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is
Speaker 4: now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday.
Speaker 5: Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind
Speaker 5: the Bastards