Robert and Mangesh Hattikudur explore the birth of the "unorthodox biomedical movement", which is a fancy way of saying "fake doctors who poison children to cure Autism". https://tinyurl.com/Help-Myanmar freeburmarangers.org See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Who is James Stout and what is the situation in Myanmar?
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 story.
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 MobiePDF. 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 h-e-l-p hyphen m-y-a-n-m-a-r if you'd like to donate somewhere else an organization that you can donate to is the free burma rangers free burma rangers.org they're a fantastic ngo they've been doing a lot of medical work uh in the liberated zones of myanmar for a very long time they've also worked in rajava and lots of other places around the world where people need help
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.
Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is happening right now to your ears. There's nothing you can do about it except for like turn off your phone or your headset, but don't do that. Listen to these great episodes that we have with my good friend, Mengesh. Mengesh, welcome to the program.
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Chapter 2: Who are the hosts and what is the episode about?
Mango's here. Mango, you used to work at the company that we currently work at, and now you're independent. You're a pirate, you know, flying your own flag in the middle of the sea, but the sea is podcasts.
Yeah. I mean, a jolly pirate, I hope.
All pirates are jolly. And you co-host a podcast with our boss and friend, Will Pearson, called Part-Time Genius.
Our boss friend.
But friend and boss. Notice how I ordered that. And people should listen to it. It's like a podcast that'll make you happy. You'll get to learn a thing, but it'll be fun.
That is so sweet. It really is. It's like the way that we used to talk in college, really nerdy and late into the night and just making each other laugh. And it feels nice that we get to do that still all these years later. Excellent.
Well, you're not going to you're not going to feel good after we tell you what we're talking about today.
What we're going to what we're going to talk about today is not something that will make you feel good.
It's going to make you feel really bad.
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Chapter 3: What tragic incident sparked the investigation into fake autism cures?
And don't they use it for NFL players? I feel like certain athletes do it, right? Yeah.
And there's some discussion that there may be some benefits there. That's when we get more into the snake oil, right? Because much of what hyperbaric chambers use for is not the stuff where it's proven to help. Again, there's maybe some sports medicine benefits to it. And there's stuff like if you have radiation injuries, hyperbaric chambers can help. So there are some real –
This is actually a very powerful therapy for certain proven things. However, there's no evidence that it does anything for ADHD or sleep apnea. Zero. Oh, man. Just not things that it helps with. But there's this widespread belief that comes out of this biomedical movement for trying to treat and cure autism that hyperbaric chambers are useful for that.
And I know I said this kid has ADHD and sleep apnea. Kind of the gist of the story that we'll be telling is an awful lot of these same people believe ADHD is another type of autism, which is not the mainstream scientific consensus.
Yeah, that's not what my understanding was.
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Chapter 4: What is hyperbaric oxygen therapy and how is it misused in autism treatment?
But that is part of why this gets lumped in. And it gets lumped in because you can then sell hyperbaric therapy to more people with kids, right? Sure, sure. So again, hyperbaric chamber is pretty cool, but they're not useful for the problems that this five-year-old kid, Thomas Cooper, had.
And because the Oxford Center existed to take money from parents with kids who had autism and other stuff going on, they didn't really care about scientific rigor or even basic safety protocol. So here's the thing about doing a therapy like this. You have essentially like 100% oxygen, right?
Now, do you remember, Mangesh, what happened to that Apollo mission that back when they were using 100% O2 inside of the spacecraft?
It doesn't seem like a smart idea.
It caught on fire on the inside and everyone died a horrible death. Yeah. Now, there's a way to deal with this, right? Because there's a part of the benefit of a hyperbaric chamber when it's useful is how much oxygen there is in there and the way that the pressure works with that.
But when you have this much oxygen, you have to take a lot of weird precautions to make sure that everyone inside the chamber doesn't get incinerated. So among other things, if you're in a properly run hyperbaric chamber, you are going to be only wearing like cotton fabric, right?
Because wool and polyester can cause extremely tiny sparks when it rubs against other fabrics or whatever in such an environment. And normally you don't notice that, but the smallest spark can cause an explosive fire that instantly burns you to death, right? That's insane.
The other thing that you do if you're putting someone in this, in addition to making sure they're wearing the right fabric, is you put a grounding thing on their wrist, right? If you've ever built computers out of parts, you've used one of these, and it's to stop you from a static discharge, from fucking up this very precious machinery that you're putting inside of a box. Right. Mm-hmm.
And so at one point he turned over and there was a spark and his entire body immediately ignited. And the hyperbaric chamber he was in was a small glass tube, just big enough for a person's body. So he had no move. There's no escaping. There's no way to get out. He's just in a tube of glass on fire. His mom, who's sitting nearby, there's no medical professionals nearby, tries to break him out.
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Chapter 5: What safety failures led to the death of a child at the Oxford Center?
No, there's usually someone, generally like a retired doctor. It's kind of like getting a pot prescription used to be where like, you've got some guy who's not really, you know, he used to be a fucking ENT doctor and he doesn't do that anymore, but he like signed some paperwork, right?
Maybe he comes by once a week.
Yeah.
You're like,
Because it's weed. It's not fun when it's the burn you to death chamber.
No, it's like, you know, you go home and Google the person who gave you the prescription and go, what fucked up thing did you do? How many people did you get killed? Why do you barely have a medical license?
Those were the days, my friend. Venice Beach. So Michigan, which is where this happens, had no rules at the time.
It happened in Michigan?
Yeah. And there were absolutely no rules about how hyperbaric chambers had to be maintained when you were doing stuff. There's absolutely no standards. But the government does come in. They find out that the Oxford Center had old machines that were way past the date in which they would have needed to be refurbished to operate safely.
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Chapter 6: How did the Autism Research Institute contribute to the biomedical movement?
Chapter 7: What historical misunderstandings about autism fueled stigma and fake cures?
Peterson's messages also show that when she was asked whether the company was promoting hyperbaric chambers to treat erectile dysfunction, she responded, whatever gets bodies in those chambers, LOL.
Jesus Christ.
LMAO, love my crimes.
What the fuck, lady? So... This is the story that got me looking into the stuff that led to the writing of this episode. We're going to be going back in time from this point, but I wanted to start kind of at the end because we're going to explain why this is a thing, right?
Why there is such an industry for quack medicine like this that promises to deal with whatever learning disability or condition your child has by giving them dangerous, absolutely scientifically unverifiable interventions.
And if I had to name the root cause of all of this, it would be the fact that autism has, for the most of the time that it has been in use as a diagnostic term, been considered like a disease, right? Like an illness and generally a life-ruining one, right? And I need to separate here the diagnostic term autism from what we know today as autism because they're very different things.
As I said in our episodes, we did some episodes on a guy named Bruno Bettelheim, who was a pioneer pioneering quack in the child development and child abuse fields in the 30s and 40s. Every child who didn't behave in accordance with the desires of adults at the time was labeled as autistic. Now, there were other labels that they used.
The term psychotic and schizophrenic were used interchangeably with autism and diagnoses of kids. who had basically any kind of behavioral issue up until the 1980s, which is when we started to gain a better understanding of what those terms mean.
Until the 1980s? Yeah. That's crazy.
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Chapter 8: What are the differences between biomedical activists and neurodiversity advocates?
I think that's, again, increasingly the way it's seen today and probably the right way to look at it is that it's a different way of being a person. It's not the same way everyone is, but it's not an inherently bad or deleterious thing.
It's just you're different, and so there are different ways that you're going to interact with and view the world and different things that are going to work when we're talking about educating people. with autism. And again, our understanding of this is still very much developing, but it's in a very primitive state in the 80s and 90s, right?
Now, people do know Asperger's syndrome is a topic of discussion by this time in like the 80s and such. And so there is an understanding that like some of these kids are like, you know, it's this idea that like some of them get superpowers, right? Which is not really an accurate way to view it. But like some, we do know that like there are
People with autism who are like super high, like highly intelligent and capable in specific areas. But the general understanding, if you get this, is that your kid is never going to live a quote unquote normal life, right? That's how people talk about it. So if you're keeping track, in the late 80s and early 90s, you got a couple of things coming together.
You have a generation of parents who are still used to and traumatized by the thought of being blamed for their kid's condition, who are also used to seeing autism depicted as a fate worse than death. Feeding into this complex churn is the fact that as the term autism grows to encompass more people, it loses what author and doctor Michael Fitzpatrick describes as a sense of coherence.
Michael wrote a great book about the biomedical movement titled Defeating Autism, A Damaging Delusion. And in it, he writes... The autistic spectrum stretched from children who were nonverbal to severely disabled to those who were of high intelligence but behaved strangely and had no friends.
The spectrum included children with Rett syndrome, a neurodegenerative disorder with an identified genetic cause, with fairly superficial similarities to autism. It also included children with atypical autism, or in the USA, pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified, a label that merely exposed the incoherence of the diagnostic framework.
As one authority commented, any classification system that includes atypical versions of one entity as a separate diagnosable entity all its own has to be next to useless as the basis for scientific progress. Which is a really good point. There's this thing, and also the opposite is also the thing. It's like, yeah, maybe we didn't have it right.
Maybe that's not a super useful term to be describing this as. Stuff like this is a moving target, and it's both worth acknowledging the harm that the fact that this is deeply incomplete and fucked up has on a lot of kids and parents at this time, and also, well, you were never going to get this right straight away. Yeah. So the confusion here is the final ingredient to what comes next.
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