Robert concludes the story of the Fake Autism Cure Industrial Complex and tells Mangesh about a doctor who tried to get rich selling spoiled blood to deranged parents.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Who is James Stout and what is his message about Myanmar?
Hi everybody, it's James here. If you didn't listen to What Could Happen Here, you might not recognise me. My name's James Stout and I'm 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 Mobier PDF. 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, 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 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, Mengesh, our great guest for today. Tina, you ever heard that quote, cometh the time, cometh the man?
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Chapter 2: What is the proposed unconventional solution to America's problems?
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. That's how we're going to fix things in this country. Look, every problem, the $7 Xanax 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 as Xanax, 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 at least somebody's got a big idea.
Yeah, again, we won't have any more elections. There are going to be like three votes that make it in every election, and none of them will have a legit, like a readable name. It's just going to be scribbles on a piece of paper. Who's the president? I don't know, fuck it.
So let's get back into this less happy story of medicine.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley season one.
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Chapter 3: What is the controversy surrounding chelation therapy and autism?
The Autism Research Institute and our buddy Dr. Rimland rode in to defend Drs. Usman and Carey 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 lookalike 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 love this because it 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. Wow.
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 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? 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 hear about 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 is because of the very, the distinctly ascientific 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.
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Chapter 4: How do biomedical treatments for autism impact children and families?
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. They just, 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 even 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. You know, maybe gotten some treatment for the GI issues or whatever, but, like, you could have just loved them, 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? This is, again, because people with autism are people, right?
But yeah, as a result of this fact, many of these parents will go to their graves secure in the belief that they stood up for their kid and helped save them, even if all they did was make the world more comfortable for the kind of con men who encourage children to avoid getting vaccinated for measles. And speaking of con, nope, speaking of ads, here they are.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid. Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
And he was just staring at me.
And they had secrets of their own to share.
I'm Gilbert King. I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
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Chapter 5: What role do social media and conferences play in promoting fake autism cures?
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. You're not a medical expert. You don't know what you're doing. No, you shouldn't be diagnosing your kid here.
Also, you can see how you slip from one to the next to the next because you're increasingly desperate. But once you're dealing with a shaman and it feels like someone in your life would tell you.
You're calling a shaman? 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 an ER nurse who 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? Yeah. And that sounds horrifying to a lot of people, but this is a person who deals with emergencies every day. Sometimes your best bet is like, give it a sec.
Well, I mean, especially when like everyone in the autism community is telling you that like there's a ticking clock, right? Like 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, like 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 all the time when they don't need to.
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Chapter 6: What tragic incidents have occurred due to hyperbaric oxygen therapy for autism?
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 like figure out this specific treatment is how to help your kid, right? But parents love that shit. Like the, oh, I'm going to get the exact kind of therapy for my individual kid. No, that's just, you're not doing it this way. Sorry.
Maybe the therapy your kid needs is for you to just like them. Yeah.
Well, also, once your kid has autism and then you get a scan, you can point to anything and say, like, this is the cause of it.
100%.
Probably the most costly of these new interventions is stem cell therapy. And this might actually... There might be treatment derived from this in the future. It's very far from clear at this point, right? At the moment, it is not approved as a treatment in the US. There are several trials gathering data on whether it's 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. And 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,
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Chapter 7: Why do some parents turn to multiple alternative treatments for their autistic children?
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? Yeah.
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, "...Broadstreet conceded that Colton did not respond well to chelation. The medical records, including reports from Mrs. Snyder, reflected that Colton did poorly after every round of chelation therapy.
The more disturbing question is why chelation was performed at all, in view of the normal levels of mercury found in the hair, blood, and urine." It's apparent lack of efficacy in treating Colton's 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. Yeah, yeah. That's –
It's just 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?
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid. Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
And he was just staring at me.
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Chapter 8: What are the dangers and ethical concerns of unproven stem cell therapies for autism?
Having been the first lady of the entire country and representing the country and the world, I couldn't afford to have that kind of disdain.
What would you say has been the most hardest recent test of fear? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Explore the winding halls of historical true crime with Holly Fry and Maria Tremarcki, hosts of Criminalia, as they uncover curious cases from the past. The legend of the highwayman suggests men dominated the field, but tell that to Lady Catherine Ferrars, known as the Wicked Lady, who terrorized England in the mid-1600s. Her legend persists nearly 400 years after her death.
Hear the story of the gentleman robber, the romantic darling of the ladies, and a tale about a wager over a sack of potatoes, but you'll have to tune in to learn who won that one. Some highwaymen were well-mannered or faked it. People were concerned about the romanticism of robbers, but most were just thugs. Highwaymen are in the hot seat this season.
Call them robbers or bandits, some are legendary figures. Listen to stories about historical crimes on Criminalia now, plus the cocktails and mocktails inspired by each. Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back. So in one conference in the early aughts after Bradstreet had become a Dan-affiliated doctor, he referred to parents who didn't blame their kid's condition on vaccines or subject them to dangerous 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, every kid with autism should have a trial of IVIG if money was not an option and if IVIG was abundant.
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