Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
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Call Zone Media. Hi, everybody. It's James here. If you didn't listen to what 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 Myanmar today, the day I'm recording this, which is Friday, the 28th of March. It was 7.7 on the Richter scale.

We know of more than 100 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 Myanmar.

I've spoken to half a dozen sources in Myanmar 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 Cyclone Nargis, which was a terrible disaster in 2008.

If you would like to support the people of Burma who are currently fighting against a 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 Moby APDF.

They are a casualty evacuation team in Southern Shan State, right at the fiercest part of the fighting right now. They don't fight. What they do is they go and they evacuate people who have been injured and they provide medical services to internally displaced people. They've been doing this since 2021. They're incredibly brave people and they've saved more than 300 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.com slash help hyphen Myanmar. That's tinyurl.com slash help hyphen Myanmar.

If you'd like to donate somewhere else, an organisation that you can donate to is the Free Burma Rangers, freeburmarangers.org. They're a fantastic NGO. They've been doing a lot of medical work in the liberated zones of Myanmar for a very long time. They've also worked in Rojava and lots of other places around the world where people need help. I

I spoke to Dave from FPR today, he's well, and he told me that they're already starting to respond to the disaster. So to donate to them, FreeBurmaRangers.org. Thanks very much. We appreciate your support. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where, you know, Mangesh, our great guest for today. Tina, you ever heard that quote, "Cometh 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. Are people you and 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, I was going to say, you're really not helping this theory. No, no. I had a vision while I was dreaming about how to save America. And so I've decided I'm running in 2028. 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, if you get enough dunks on people in public debates or whatever, you can stop parents and the like from 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 subsidized using federal money, a $7 bar of Xanax the size of a Snickers bar. You just get them over the counter. Any grocery store, any pharmacy, just a Snickers bar of pure Xanax. You can lick it like a horse. You can do whatever you want with it. $7 flat. You know? That's how we're going to fix things in this country. Look.

Every problem, the $7 Zanuck Snickers bar solves, right? You got a guy walks into a fucking public building wanting to do a mass shooting, reaches for his gun, finds a $7 Snickers bar at Zanuck's, bites it, forgets why he's there. Problem solved. You know, everything could be this way.

I'm so glad you're coming with the solution. Yeah, this is how we save America. I'm convinced everyone vote Evans 2028 for your $7 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, again, we won't have anymore

elections there 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 gonna be scribbles on a piece of paper who's the president fuck it so let's get back into this less less happy story of medicine

The best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. But if we're honest, most people run from them, staying silent, missing chances, and holding themselves back. I know this is true because I used to be like that until I realized that negotiation isn't a talent, it's a skill that anyone can learn.

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The Autism Research Institute and our buddy Dr. Rimland rode in to defend Drs. Usman and Kari after Tariq's death, writing in a post on the institute's website that Tariq had died not because of chelation therapy, but because of an error that had seen him dosed with a look-alike drug, disodium EDTA, instead of calcium disodium 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 better.

Yeah, that's like a weak argument. That's like, no, no, no, I didn't give him fentanyl. I just shot him up with way too much heroin. Like, yeah! I don't really see how that helps. This is also untrue. Tariq was administered with the normal kind of EDTA used in chelation therapy, which is the only kind the clinic had stocked.

In subsequent publications, Dr. Rimland bragged that chelation therapy had consistently good results as rated by paramedics who were surveyed by ARI. In fact, it was the number one pick out of 88 approved interventions. What? Yes. They

They love this because it's clearly is serious medicine, right? It doesn't help. It makes things worse generally, but 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 weird. There's a quote in there from like an expert on tin poisoning who's like- Is tin poisoning really a thing? 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 we have other issues autism's not the problem you're letting your five year old weld

What are you doing? Take that torch away from them.

Now, the actual explanation for why this kid- Although if they're productive, like, you know. Sure, why not? Why not? It's good for kids to have a hobby. At least they're touching. If they can't touch grass, they might as well touch heated tin. Now, again, they do a test which shows high levels of mercury and tin in this kid's blood. But-

That's not the whole story. You brought that and you're like, oh, well, maybe there was something going on. 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. What would you do first? What would you do first if you thought they might have high levels of heavy metals? Get a blood test. Right. Very basic science, right? Okay, you think this is true. Let's test their blood. No, no, no. No, no, no.

I'm so afraid. The way you give these blood tests in this kind of therapy is first you chelate 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. Why? So you give them a drug that provokes them to excrete heavy metals and then test them. And then you know what? You're going to find some heavy metals. Okay.

Because you gave them the drug that makes them excrete them. Um...

And here's the thing. There's no except because this isn't the way science where you don't do this. Otherwise, there's no accepted understanding for what normal results on a test given after chelation 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 charts that show 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 shouldn't, not a doctor, Dr. Carl Baum, director of the Center for Children's Environmental Toxicology at the Yale New Haven Children's Hospital, calls this, quote, exactly the wrong way to do it. Wow.

Wow. Now, Dr. Usman did ultimately face mild consequences. In 2009, the Chicago Tribune featured her in their dubious medicine investigation, which helped push for a probe 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

In 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 therapy 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 in signing the consent order. She agreed to pay a $10,000 fine. Great. $10,000. I love that this is the punishment. I know. I know. It's crazy. Now, the other boy that she's 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 their 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 Komen's son has an unusual skill. The 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 regimen of supplements and medications aimed at treating the disorder. Besides taking many pills, the boy was injected with vitamin B12 and received an intravenous infusions of a drug used to leach mercury and other metals from the body. He took megadoses of vitamin C, a hormone in a drug that suppresses testosterone.

They're just doing everything to this kid. Again, none of these treat me. The fact that his skill is that he can swallow seven pills at a time is all beautiful. He's able to take so many pills.

That's not an America's Got Talent. Yeah. Now, the Coleman boy also suffered extreme negative side effects from chelation, 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 2009 summed 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 linked to the influential group Defeat Autism Now, promote the therapies online in books and at conferences. Intensive regimens 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 the format for this. It's awful. 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 8000 members. The treatment takes many forms, including creams for the skin, capsules, suppositories and intravenous infusions of powerful medicines usually reserved for people with severe metal poisoning.

The hype was so big around this stuff in 2006 that the National Institute of Mental Health announced a randomized control trial of chelation 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 2008 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 it's helped anybody and we know it hurts people. So we just can't do this to kids. Now.

Now, they also they have they've done some studies on lab rats that have showed that drugging lab rats needlessly with chelation 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 artists, doctors of the biomedical movement take this as evidence that big size, 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 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 2007, the Cochran Collaboration, an independent evaluator of medical research, reviewed the efficacy of casein 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 proved that proper diet could eliminate the symptoms of autism.

But, per Scientific American, Cochrane identified two very small clinical trials, one with 20 participants and one with 15. The first study found some reduction in autism symptoms. The second found none. A new randomized controlled trial of 14 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 Hyman. Now, 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, yeah, yeah, yeah. And this statement was made initially in response to Tariq Nadama's death. You might want to recall here that Tariq was diagnosed with 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 Jenny McCarthy's kid also like, she said he was autistic and then he wasn't autistic? And then she said she's cured him. She says she's cured him. Yeah. Oh my God. I hope that kid is okay. I don't know. Now, this kind of talk, it's like, well, we've actually, we're the experts. We've done so much to understand this. It's very common among the loudest mouthpieces of the movement, which includes Jenny McCarthy. Right.

We've discussed before her appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show, which played a massive role in igniting the anti-vax movement in the U.S. McCarthy, whose son Evan was diagnosed with autism, describes herself as having a PhD in Google. She does not. Ha ha ha ha!

But she did have a role to play in the death of that five-year-old who burnt alive in a hyperbaric chamber. In 2016, Jenny pivoted from her successful anti-vax campaign and started advocating 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. One thing you can see is that there's a level of inflation in the brains of people with autism. Inflammation in the brains of people with autism. We don't know why

We don't know how this relates to the... 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. Stuff doesn't always...

It's not all the same, right? Even the microbiome being different of autistic kids and diet not being able to affect it, right? Yeah. It's hard. Yeah. And so it's this thing where you are taking two unrelated facts and using them to put kids in these death tubes. Yeah.

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, HBO2, 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 and 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 HBO2 therapy for ASD.

This conference included an expert panel of chiropractors and osteopaths, as well as, along with those august medical experts, a YouTuber named Lily, who made a video about hyperbaric treatment helped her little sister. McCarthy was joined on the panel by Del Bigtree, producer of the movie Vaxxed, and one of the ladies from The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Truly!

A symposium of the greatest minds in medicine. Awesome. Another conference expert was Dr. Anju Usman, whose husband sells hyperbaric chambers. Oh, my God. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

I was not expecting that twist. Oh, yeah, baby. Now, this is all made especially infuriating because four years before this conference in 2012, a four-year-old boy and his 62-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 grandmother. And he caught on fire as he tried to save them. They both die nightmarish deaths four years before this conference. Virginia McCarthy saying everybody should do this for their kids. Um,

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? Right, right. That's just life, you know? This is going to be the case with a 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 will 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 dealt with the help, you know, maybe gotten some treatment of the GI issues or whatever. But like you could have just loved him, you know, 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, right?

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, securing 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 encourage children to avoid getting vaccinated for measles. And speaking of con, nope, speaking of ads, here they are.

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Good stuff, good stuff, good stuff. So every now and then, when you read about the biomedical community, you do hear about the rare wins, 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 Zurcher and her family. Emma was born in 2002, and she started to show signs of autism at like age two and a half, right around the time Tariq would have died, right? Her mother, Arianne, 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.

Per the Atlantic, quote, she and her husband took Emma to neurologists, gastroenterologists, 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 $200 per visit and had a months-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 more honest,

than the doctors? Holy fuck. Like, oh, wow. That is an unbelievable list. The psychic's like, no, 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, chelation, 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 like, well, 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 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 don't you're not a medical expert you don't 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 to the next because you're increasingly desperate but like yeah once you're dealing with like a shaman and and uh like it feels like someone in your life would tell you

A psychic. I don't know if the shaman knows how to cure autism. The ultimate result of all these specialty diets was that Emma shed body weight at a dangerous pace, loosing 15% 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 hooey, 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, yeah. That's just not, it's not smart. It's so heartbreaking. I have a friend who's in ER news. She says sometimes the best thing to do at 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.

Take a look. Take a look. Think it through. Everyone in the autism community is telling you that there's a ticking clock, right? You're trying to race and beat the clock. This is also, it's another thing. It's a thing that gets people killed in war zones. I've seen it. This desire, this feeling a need to do something when, again, the people who are the real veterans, the people, number one, they also do react when they need to, but they also don't react. Yeah.

all the time when they don't need to. They tend to keep to watch it that

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 2009, about 75% of parents of children with autism reported using alternate medicine. Today, it's about 88%, nearly all of them.

If you have the money, there are a truly dizzying number of options available. Like SPECT, a $3,500 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 figure out this specific treatment is how to help your kid, right? But parents love that shit. Like, 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. Also, also, once your kid has autism and and then you get a scan, you can point to anything and say, like, sure, look at this thing. I don't know what it is, but it says autism, you know, 100 percent. Probably the most costly of these new interventions is 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 U.S. There are several trials gathering data on whether it's safe or 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 $10,000. Sarah Collins credits the adult stem cell injections her two children received in Panama City, Panama, with the recovery of her older son and improvement in her younger son, both of whom 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 U.S. 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 like, 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, well, say that

doesn't have good standards. Say your kid gets hurt and maybe it's not even because of actual stem cell therapy. It's 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 Bascom, who has a blog called Just Stimming. This talking to Julia keyed her in on the fact that, well, maybe autism 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. Yeah. Like, yeah, that's the ballgame. 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.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and it's, it is tragic. Like the amount of the wasted years. Yeah. 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. As a guinea pig. It's sad. Yeah. Now in this case, you know, 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. Yeah.

And so instead of trying shooting her up with more drugs and shit, she tries a different kind of intervention. She gives her kid a keyboard set up 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 Zurcher 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 respond. Jesus. Yeah. And that would be a beautiful note to end on, Mangesh. If we...

But this is a different show. This is behind the bastards. So we're not going to end on that uplifting note. Instead, I'm going to tell you a whole other 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 names. Always the worst. Born in July 1954 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 in aerospace medicine and his actual career was as a family doctor.

But in 1997, after he'd been practicing for a little over a decade, his son was diagnosed with autism. As Fitzpatrick writes, Jeff Bradstreet abandoned his career as a family doctor to become a radio talk show host. Great. Great start. Great start. Yeah.

He immediately met up with the biomedical activists and founded the International Child Development Resource Center in Florida, or the ICDRC. In 2001, he appointed Andrew Wakefield to be head of research there. Bradstreet 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.

Again, this is a guy who's like qualified to help your kid with the flu, you know, not to like downplay family medicine. But this is not a guy who's qualified to cure, among other things. Nobody is. It's not a thing. That's not a thing that happens.

In the book Deadly Choices, Paul Offit describes Bradstreet's clinical approach this way. Bradstreet had promoted several cures for autism, including secretin, chelation, immunoglobulin, administered by mouth and by vein, and prednisone, 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 Dr. Bradstreet were also sold by Dr. Bradstreet. Ha ha ha!

Sure, that's fine. Cool. Great. And this is, we're at like the late 90s, right? Yeah, yeah, this is like the late 90s. This guy would be on TikTok. Oh, my God. He might have been, actually. You know what, Sophie? Good news. We're going to talk about what this guy winds up doing in the present era. It's actually the best part of the story. So.

In 1999, Bradstreet began treating Colton Snyder, ultimately examining him more than 160 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 a spinal tap, that's not a thing you fuck around with. They're just stabbing this kid in the spine with needles. See if that makes it better.

160 times feels very, very thorough. 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 Offit 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, Bradstreet, this is not said directly, but his parents have money. This is not cheap. That's not cheap.

That's why Bradstreet's doing this. His medical documentation of Snyder ultimately runs to some 650 pages. He diagnoses the boy over the years with autism, yeast overgrowth, a fungal infection, unspecified encephalopathy, unspecified eudicaria, and a shitload of other things.

And it's so many different things that it is clear that what's going on here is Bradstreet has – this is like a Munchausen's by doctor syndrome, right? And it's – 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 were ever high, but still Bradstreet, who believed mercury contributed to autism, prescribed numerous rounds of chelation therapy. A write-up in Quackwatch summarizes, Bradstreet conceded that Colton did not respond well to chelation. The medical records, including reports from Mrs. Snyder, reflected that Colton did poorly after

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 symptoms and the adverse side effects it apparently caused. That's another thing you encounter where these parents and these practitioners, the practitioners will convince the parents, oh yeah, if your kid's having, if they're responding negatively, that's the toxins leaving. Of course it's ugly, you know? Yeah, yeah. That's...

It's so hard to listen to. It's awful. It's real fucked up. These people should all have gone 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?

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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 biomedical 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 poisoning them.

Fitzpatrick notes that other experts in the field speak in similar ways. Quote, Ginny 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 asks 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. Yeah.

When the Chicago Tribune interviewed Bradstreet about his use of IV immunoglobulin, or IVIG, as an autism treatment, he told them, 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 moneymaker for his clinic.

In 2008, more than 5,000 families enmeshed in the biomedical movement launched a lawsuit seeking compensation for vaccine-related harm in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

Bradstreet was one of their major witnesses. He provided expert testimony, which ultimately failed because the special masters, which is the name of the people who are evaluating this claim, look into Bradstreet 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 Bradstreet, right? Yeah. Still, by 2009, Bradstreet had been in practice so long that he claimed his institute has records on more than 4,000 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 a clinic in Beaufort. Because staying competitive in the industry of fake autism treatments required constant innovation, Bradstreet became an advocate 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 2012, he gave a presentation in England in which he described injecting 40 patients with autism with this shit, declaring, I shouldn't call it shit, 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 on to basically lose the label of autism. They don't have autistic distinctions anymore after sometimes as little as 20 weeks of therapy.

Now, this just isn't the way this works. It's not really how anything works. But Bradstreet tended to show 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 immunobiotech, which manufactures GCMAF. And in fact, he shouts this guy out and then offers attendees to the speech a 25% discount on GCMAF. Wow.

Sounds like medicine to me, bro. I love it when my doctor gives me a fucking coupon for blood factor. Great. Well, it's coming from- Honestly, because he's a radio host. Sure. Yeah, of course. It does come- Right, right. Absolutely. Per a 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 ImmunoBiotech. During the same UK trip, Bradstreet and Noakes made what was essentially a promotional video for ImmunoBiotech and its brand of GCMAF, called First Immune.

Quote, I'm here with Dr. Jeffrey Bradstreet from the USA, the autism expert in the first immune GCMAF laboratories, Noakes said on camera. Dr. Bradstreet has been using our GCMAF for 18 months, and we'd like to thank you for, I think you've treated 900 children now? Not just children, Bradstreet boasted. So the spectrum of my patients with autism ranges from somewhere around 18 months to goodness, somewhere around close to 40. 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 traded compliments for four minutes straight, just gassing each other up for four minutes. Again, it sounds like medicine.

Now, the transcripts for this are just impossibly fucking cringy with Noak saying, we've never met a doctor with such an understanding at the microbiological level of how autism and cancer and other diseases work. And again, 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 lung cancer. Fuck it. And gout. Yeah, gout. Sure, fuck it. And one of the things like Bradstreet goes back to after Noakes gasses 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 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 internet sites, 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 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. I think about shit like that. We're like, yeah, okay. But what if we just did that for children's medicine? You know? That's incredible. Oh, man, it is so funny. I just don't understand how...

It's so shameless, like going from children to like 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. People who buy that shit know what they're getting. Yeah.

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 School of Tropical Medicine Dean Peter Hotez told The Post. And by the way, Dr. 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 2,000 children and claimed 85% of them improved and 15% had their autism eradicated. The initial hype was massive, but the actual comments from parents who used the treatment were standard. Some claimed small positive, while others claimed hard to rate changes like, "Well, he's talking more." Many though recorded disappointment. Quote,

I can't imagine like...

I can't imagine ordering something online and being like, yeah, I should shoot my kid with it. Time to shoot this into my child with a needle. 20 times. It's unbelievable. I don't know. Maybe that's child abuse. I'm sorry. I know you quote unquote love your kid, but that sounds like child abuse to me. Completely. Yeah. Obviously,

Little kids don't understand. Sometimes you have to, if they're sick, you have to give them 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, I'm sure some of this was causing some sort of delirium and the kids were talking as a result of that. Maybe. I think he'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, well, this is fucked up. This is not just 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. Yeah.

I'm afraid. So nervous. I've spent a lot of these episodes talking about what a bad idea it is to make parents without medical training part of the diagnostic and treatment process in this way. But the Bradstreet 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 into 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 Immunobiotech. 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 or Northern Ireland given the name Fiona O'Leary. But she – this leads to the – the UK's equivalent of the FDA does an investigation that culminates in a raid on a first immune GCMAF production facility near Cambridge.

This is the lab where he filmed that video, where Bradstreet films the video with Noakes where they're gassing each other up. Which I heard was pristine. You heard that. So while Bradstreet had praised the lab's sterility, UK regulators described it as making GCMAF out of, quote, blood plasma labeled not to be administered to humans or used in any drug products. Oh, my God.

they're getting this out of the shit blood does that make it better because at least regular like people who need blood aren't losing I don't know I don't know I don't know what we say here oh my god I am sad eventually she succeeds it's so fucked up right oh my god where was this blood coming from

She succeeds eventually in getting U.S. regulators to look into Bradstreet, which brought the feds to his door in Buford on June 18th, 2015. Had he been indicted properly, Bradstreet might have faced 20 years in prison, according to the suspected charges on 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 a first immune 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 6,000 euros a week for treatment. And to be clear, we don't know that the GCMA have 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 Beaufort probably contributed to Jeffrey's decision to take his own life on June 19th. 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 ImmunoBiotech, who insisted that Jeffrey was murdered by pharmaceutical companies for stating that the MR 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 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 2022. 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, chelation, and protein shots for T-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. Happy trails, everybody. Mango, you got any plugs to plug? Yeah, definitely. I did a show called Skyline Drive, which is about a skeptical look at astrology. It's really good.

And I would love for people to check it out if they have the time. But honestly, Robert, Sophie, this is 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 I don't know, really enlightening.

Yep. Well, glad to be horrifying and enlightening. Horrifying lightning. And now I need that Snickers bar of Xanax. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Now, again, this is the solution to all of our problems is the $7 Snickers bar of Xanax. The salt flick. Yeah. Again, very...

Vote Evans. A Snickers bar of Xanax in every pocket. And honestly, none of us is going to know what happens next, but that's kind of the benefit, right? Jesus Christ. And look, are some people going to die? Absolutely. And we're going to knock down the Washington Monument and replace it with a monument that's just a four bar. A giant four bar in the sky. Wow. Problem solved.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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