Three weeks ago, I did a post about how prone the antivaccine movement is to conspiracy theories. At that time, one example that I used was the then-very recent death of an autism quack and antivaccinationist (but I repeat myself) who’s been big in the “autism biomed” movement for a long time and a regular fixture at autism quackfests like Autism ONE for many years. I’m referring, of course, to Jeff Bradstreet, whose body was found in a river on June 19, dead from a gunshot wound to the chest that appeared to have been self-inflicted. It didn’t take long (less than a week) for the antivaccine movement to start speculating about conspiracies in which Bradstreet had been “bumped off” by big pharma, as represented by comments like these:
- “It’s obvious that he was deliberately killed off because he spoke out against federal deceit, CDC, etc and was a life-saver for many like myself.”
- “He did NOT kill himself! He was murdered for who he was speaking against, what he knew, and what he was doing about it. He was brilliant kind compassionate doctor with amazing abilities to heal. He was taken. Stopped. Silenced.”
- “If this does not stink to high heaven I don’t know what does. A fisherman finds his body with a gunshot wound that appears to be a self inflicted. Just how the hell would they know that. Amazingly they happen to find the gun in the river. Wow that is some amazing detective work.”
- “What a tragic loss of a beloved doctor. I pray the authorities get to the bottom of this story…it seems highly unlikely that a Christian man would shoot himself in thy chest and conveniently fall into a river.”
You get the idea. Meanwhile, others insinuated the existence of, basically, pharma hit squads. Not long afterward, Bradstreet’s family started a GoFundMe page to “find the truth.”
Let me just say one thing. I understand, to some extent, what the Bradstreet family is going through. My family has not escaped without having had one of its members commit suicide. Although it was someone I wasn’t particularly close to, he was very close to close family members. So I understand better than most the pain they are going through. They have my sympathy.
That being said, it appears that more information is coming out about what happened in the days leading to Bradstreet’s death. It’s even started to filter out to major media outlets, as in this story published yesterday in the Washington Post, The mysterious death of a doctor who peddled autism ‘cures’ to thousands:
James Jeffrey Bradstreet was one of the world’s most famous — or infamous — physicians. He believed vaccines caused autism. He even testified so before Congress. Twice.
But he didn’t just rail against Big Pharma. He also tried to beat it.
Bradstreet offered thousands of autism patients around the globe controversial treatments. He claimed he could effectively cure kids of their autism, cancer and other maladies simply by injecting them with protein shots.
When Bradstreet’s body was found last month in the Rocky Broad River in mountainous North Carolina with a bullet wound to the chest, therefore, friends, family members and patients pointed fingers at drug corporations. The FDA. Anyone but Bradstreet.
“He did not kill himself!” one patient’s parent wrote online.
“May God have vengeance quickly on the evil doers who murdered him!” wrote another.
From this story, we also learn that Bradstreet’s family had quickly raised $33,000 to investigate his death and had used the money to hire private investigators. I rather suspect that the conspiracy theories surrounding his death will never die. They’ll be like John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories in that they’ll never die, although they will only be known to the dark underbelly of the antivaccine movement and autism quackery.
Conspiracy theories aside, we’re finally learning what appears to be the event that might have pushed Bradstreet to kill himself. It turns out that the day before he apparently killed himself, his office was the target of a federal search warrant in relationship to his use of an unapproved drug to treat autism, GcMAF. Readers were kind enough to supply me with a copy of the search warrant. Basically, the warrant gave permission to search the Bradstreet Wellness Center in Buford, GA for “records, documents and items” related to:
- All Globulin component Macrophage Activating Factor (GCMAF), GC-Globulin, and/or any other products or component substances thereof that constitute misbranded drugs under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
- All records, in whatever for, associated with or pertaining to the acquisition, possession, distribution of unapproved drugs, prescriptions, and/or health care products. The records to be seized include those related to the brokering, ordering, purchasing, shipping, sale, and distribution of any drugs, including business journal and ledgers; tax records, and related work papers; purchase and sales records; communications; bank and financial records; shipment/transport records; supplier and customer records; regulatory compliance records and communications with federal, state, and local authorities; and any unopened mail addressed to or from the companies mentioned therein.
The warrant also authorized authorities to search for “all books, records, and documents” identifying current and former employees, any and all electronic, digital, and paper records relating to GcMAF, computers and peripherals, financial records, and more. You get the idea. As the news story I referenced above put it, whether or not any doubt remains over whether Bradstreet did indeed commit suicide, it’s clear that his use of dubious autism treatments had finally caught up with him after all these years. He was definitely in the FDA’s sights for his autism quackery. Strangely enough (to me) and frustratingly, it was not all his previous quackery that finally led to what one could only have hoped, had Bradstreet not killed himself, the beginning of the end of his empire of quackery and his taking up residence in a federal penitentiary. Remember, this is a guy who peddled hyperbaric oxygen chambers, chelation therapy, bogus stem cell treatments, hormone injections, secretin, and just about every sort of “autism biomed” quackery you can imagine, and then some. Let’s just put it this way. Bradstreet has in the past advocated exorcism to treat autism, although in the Autism Omnibus hearing, where he appeared as an expert witness for the complainants, he denied ever having performed exorcisms for autism. Yet it was GcMAF that finally led to the federal government taking substantive action.
So what is GcMAF? It’s a protein that is found normally in the blood of healthy people. It is an immunomodulatory protein, in that its activity affects the function of the immune system. The glycoprotein (a protein with sugar molecules attached) GcMAF results from sequential deglycosylation of the vitamin D-binding protein (the Gc protein), and the resulting protein is felt to be a macrophage activating factor (MAF). MAFs are a class of protein known as a lymphokine, and they regulate the expression of antigens on the surface of macrophages. One of their functions is to “activate” macrophages, which can under the proper circumstances attack cancer cells. Of note, the production of GcMAF can be blocked by an enzyme called Nagalase (alpha-N-acetylgalactosaminidase), produced by many cancers, which led to its first incarnation in quackery, as a “cure” for many cancers by Bill Sardi (remember him?) and Timothy Hubbell based on dubious science and a clinical trial that didn’t show what its proponents claimed it did and was later retracted.
Bradstreet was a true believer in GcMAF as a cure for autism. For instance, check out this video of him promoting GcMAF as a cure for autism at the Treating Autism Conference at Brunel University in 2012:
He starts out as saying he’s been studying HIV and that’s what connected him up with GcMAF, claiming that he noted elevated Nagalase activity in autistic children, which presumably results in lowered GcMAF levels. This resulted in a paper based on 40 autistic children that he published in Autism Insights in which he claimed to have found elevated Nagalase levels in autistic children that were reduced by injecting GcMAF. Of course, one wonders why injecting more substrate would lower Nagalase levels, given that the usual response of the body to more substrate for an enzyme is to increase the activity of the enzyme in order to take care of the additional substrate. Be that as it may, it’s possible that GcMAF injections could decrease Nagalase levels if they were pathologically elevated; it just doesn’t seem particularly plausible. What GcMAF injections could theoretically do is simply bypass the activity of Nagalase (which, remember, blocks the production of GcMAF) and lead to increased GcMAF levels. Be that as it may, Bradstreet also claimed improvement in autistic symptoms. Of course, this was a single-arm uncontrolled study; so it’s not particularly compelling evidence. It was also published in what was before it was discontinued in essence a vanity journal whose editorial board was packed with autism quacks, including Andrew Wakefield, Bryan Jepson, and Arthur Krigsman.
Another study with which Bradstreet was involved in claimed that GcMAF could normalize abnormal gene expression in the endocannabinoid system of autistic children, which, of course, links his work with claims made by some in the “autism biomed” movement that medical marijuana treats autism. Of course, this was an unrandomized, unblinded study (other than one person carrying out a lab test, specifically Ki67-ir profiles.
Based on highly dubious science and clinical data, Bradstreet was an enthusiastic backer of GcMAF, working with David Noakes, the head of Immuno Biotech:
During the same U.K. trip, Bradstreet and Noakes made what was essentially a promotional video for Immuno Biotech and its brand of GcMAF, called First Immune.
“I’m here with Dr. Jeffrey Bradstreet from the U.S.A., 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’ve found application for a fairly broad number of disorders for the product.”
And:
“Dr. Jeffrey Bradstreet has now treated over 2,000 autistic children with GcMAF and the results are well established,” according to one of Noakes’s Web sites. “85% improve, if only a little, and of them 15% have their autism eradicated. In all 3,000 children have been treated with GcMAF with similar results.”
Internet chatrooms reveal how desperate parents were drawn to these promises like moths to a flame.
The discussion forum on Autism Web shows hundreds of parents of autistic children seeking out alternative methods of treating, or even “curing,” their kids.
“We are doing GcMAF injections through Bradstreet,” began one thread in August of 2011. “It has been 5 weeks. Each shot is $90 so I’m hoping we will see something big soon. I would love to hear from anyone else that has been doing the treatment for longer than us.”
Dozens responded. The replies varied from wary to ecstatic.
Of course, lots of quack treatments for autism and other conditions have enthusiastic testimonials to back them up. What’s seen less commonly are the negative testimonials, and Bradstreet has those:
“We have completed 20 shots of GcMAF so far. I am still waiting for the wow that everyone talks about,” one person wrote. Even worse, they described side effects including “crying and pains in his chest and stomach at least for first 3 days after the shot.”
“We are doing GcMAF injections. I have not seen any gains at all,” another person wrote. “I have seen the worse behaviors and tantrums. So after spending $1,300 for no gains and living in hell I am done with this.”
Others described nasty viral or bacterial infections which flared up after starting their kids on GcMAF.
“It came to a point where we couldn’t tolerate it any more,” an angry parent wrote.
The problems with Bradstreet’s quackery led an Irish woman named Fiona O’Leary to begin investigating First Immune and complaining to UK health authorities. her efforts led the authorities to act. The First Immune GcMAF production facility in the UK was raided by British health authorities earlier this year. They found that the facility did not meet Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) standards and expressed concerns over the sterility of the medicine being produced and the equipment being used, leading to further concerns that the product could well be contaminated. More than 10,000 vials of GcMAF were seized and production was halted.
After O’Leary had complained to the FDA as well, four months later on June 18, the day before Bradstreet killed himself, the feds showed up at Bradstreet’s Buford, GA clinic, search warrant in hand. Had he been convicted Bradstreet could have faced up to 20 years in prison. Of course, we all know from a previous autism quackery conviction that Bradstreet would probably never have been jailed that long, given that sentences in these discussions are usually the maximum possible and seldom actually given under federal sentencing guidelines, but to see him in jail would have been sweet indeed, even if it were only for a couple of years. Antivaccinationists know that, and has become a target of their wrath, with accusations of “murder” and not having a soul.
In any case, Bradstreet fled for North Carolina, and drove three hours northeast to Lake Lure, NC, where he checked into a hotel. There he learned that a First Immune clinic run by Noakes had been shut down in an investigation of five deaths associated with GcMAF treatments. In fairness, it’s not clear whether the deaths were due to GcMAF or just terminal patients dying, but Swiss officials were on the trail as well. Hours after learning of this, Bradford disappeared. He wasn’t seen alive again. Although the investigation is not complete, authorities are satisfied that Bradstreet had committed suicide.
Yet the conspiracy theories continue:
“I know it was murder,” the Immuno Biotech CEO said. “Dr. Bradstreet stated what we all know: that the MMR vaccine causes autism,” repeating a claim often wielded by anti-vaccine activists that’s been totally debunked. “And he was an expert witness in many court cases in the U.S.A. providing testimony to that effect. MMR is a multibillion dollar vaccine and this [GcMFA] hurts the profits of the MMR drug companies and that is why he was killed.”
In a half-hour phone interview, Noakes told The Post that he was convinced a vaccine company killed Bradstreet to protect its profits from the wonder “cure” that is GcMFA.
“He was raided by the FDA the day before his murder so the murder is now dressed up to look like suicide,” Noakes claimed.
“Why would a doctor use a gun?” he continued. “A doctor wouldn’t use a gun at all. He’d use barbiturates or a cocktail of drugs which are easily available to him and take no effort.”
While it’s true that doctors who kill themselves are indeed more than twice as likely to use self-poisoning with drugs or other substances than the general population, they’re actually just as likely to use firearms, even in a population that doesn’t have many guns. In the gun-rich US, firearms are the most common method of physician suicide, being the method of nearly half of physician suicides and only slightly less common than in the general population. So all the incredulous dismissals of the conclusion that Bradstreet killed himself based on the belief that Bradstreet couldn’t have possibly killed himself with a gun because he’s a doctor and doctors don’t kill themselves that way are complete nonsense based on misinformation about physician suicide. To cast doubt on suicide as a cause of Bradstreet’s death will require a lot more than a mistaken belief that doctors don’t kill themselves with firearms, because they do.
In reality, it’s clear that Jeff Bradstreets many years of applying his quackery to autistic children had finally—finally—caught up with him. I’m actually sorry that he killed himself, both for the pain it caused his family, but also because it means that Bradstreet ultimately escaped justice. It means he will never face a judge and jury for the many years he victimized autistic children with a wide variety of quackery. That saddens me, but I can still hope that Bradstreet’s co-conspirators face the justice he eluded.
190 replies on “GcMAF, autism “biomed,” and the apparent suicide of an autism quack”
Perhaps I’m just extra jaded or in a bad mood this morning but:
“Bradstreet was a true believer in GcMAF as a cure for autism. ”
Are we sure of this? I wonder if he damn well knew it was all fraud, but like Dr Oz DGAF as along as the money was rolling in.
One wonders if it was an attack of conscience over his sins as opposed to someone feeling they have been persecuted wrongly, a la a Buddy Dwyer situation…
Why would some “hit team” kill him if he was about to go to jail for a long, long, long time?
Oh, I get it…there were multiple groups “out to get him”. Yeah, right.
Clearly, “they” feared what Bradstreet might reveal about their conspiracy in a public trial. 🙂
@ #2
He was in possession of information that Big Pharma didn’t want revealed and brought to the public’s attention during a legal proceeding?
Just have to connect the dots, lol.
If this guy had left a video in which he stated his reason for suicide, e.g., was afraid of going to the crowbar hotel, and then shot himself on camera, some people would still shout conspiracy.
Oops … Orac beat me to it.
#2 Chris Hickie
It can be like herding cats to coordinate a decent set of multiple conspiracies. And an international one like this with at least three countries involved is amazingly complicated. The time differences alone make it a problem. Add in inter-agency competition and it’s a nightmare. It’s a wonder the hit squad didn’t find themselves in the wrong Georgia.
For those who read a bit of French (and even if you don’t come to think of it, look at the first paragaph) the Swiss report in 24 Heures (http://www.24heures.ch/vaud-regions/lausanne-region/clinique-privee-vaudoise-enquete-penale-cinq-morts/story/12349881) is a delight. I am not sure but I think the only thing that GcMAF did not cure was athlete’s foot.
For any
Orac pointed out a study that showed that even in the England and Wales, where firearms are much less readily available than they are in, say, the American South, physicians do use firearms to commit suicide.
Although anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists have questioned whether Bradstreet’s death could be a suicide since it involved a firearm, a study of physician suicide here in the US found “For physicians, firearms were the most common method [of suicide] (48%), followed by poisoning (23.5%), blunt trauma (14.5%), and asphyxia which included hanging (14%).”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3549025/
Yep. That’s an even better study than mine; I used mine because, as you point out, firearms are less common in England and Wales. I’ll add it.
Fiona O’Leary is an amazing woman, who has autistic children and was diagnosed with Asperger’s herself a few years ago. Her fight against autism biomed quackery is bearing fruit. I’m sorry that this man was such a coward that he committed suicide.
Anyone interested in observing how conspiracy theories evolve should consult AoA and Autism Investigated which both included posts about Bradstreet wherein commenters speculated about his death and its association to OTHER recent deaths of alt med practitioners.
It’s actually funny that Noakes claims that “Big Pharma” is against GcMAF because it reduces the MMR profits…If the non-sense about MMR and autism were true, then GcMAF producers would actually have better profits treating so-called MMR-produced diseases. Their arguments are contradicting themselves… Meanwhile, “Big Pharma” would have jumped on GcMAF straight away.
Looks like the Big Pharma “wet teams” are going after Naturopath doctors all over the country…allegedly.
http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2015/07/12/whos-killing-off-our-naturopathic-doctors-ill-let-you-guess/
EB:
Not conscience, not feelings of persecution…
Just facing fate-worse-than-death for whatever reason… Not being able to see bad outcomes as within your ability to change…
With the Feds closing in – regardless of whether he felt guilt or righteousness – Bradstreet could probably imagine only loss of status, humiliation, and physical subjugation as he moved through the legal system. He’d no longer be the brave maverick MD, savior of children, and the ray of hope for the terminally ill, just another orange-clad prisoner ducking cameras on a perp walk. I’d guess the psychology of an anti-vax hero figure could rest on a fairly shaky form of messianic ego. Maybe needing to be savior for some compensatory function, but not totally and unshakably convinced, needing a continued spotlight to bask in at Autism One, biotech scam shill videos, etc. For all we know, other factors in his life could have been chipping at his foundation, and the arrest warrant was just the tipping-point straw. Whatever they may be saying on AoA, you’d have to guess that with SB277 signed into law know at some level that they’ve lost The Big One. Bradstreet could have been depressed about that.
Anyway, just one element of irrationality in the CTs is the concept that a suicidal MD would be rational enough to choose a barbituate overdose to a gun – trust me, when you’ve decided to off yourself, your rationality is pretty spotty…
Seaking of conspiracy theories, has anyone seen this?
http://www.healthnutnews.com/fifth-holistic-alternative-doctor-33-found-dead-in-florida-making-5-dead-and-5-more-missing-doctors/
(My apologies if the formatting is wrong; haven’t got the hang of this site’s coding just yet)
Missed JeffM’s post. Sorry for the duplication.
The person who hasn’t been mentioned (or seemingly even existent) in the Bradstreet family internet chatter is Bradstreet’s widow, while his former wife Lori is prominent in the comments (including her own) on fb and gofundme. A video memorial which included many pictures of Bradstreet with his (now) widow and stepson was posted to the Remembering Dr. Bradstreet fb page, along with an explanation that American Pie was his favorite song, but then the video was seemingly removed from the fb page. The memorial video that disappeared from the Remembering fb page is still on youtube:
Following the removal of the vid from fb, posts praising Bradstreet’s former wife and posts denying “rumors” of estrangement within the Bradstreet family appeared. It’s very odd — makes one wonder what his widow has told authorities and how it aligns with the conspiracy theory being used to generate donations.
Health Nut News is run by Joe Mercola’s wife or partner or girlfriend, Erin Elizabeth.
https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2014/01/27/cancer-quack-robert-o-young-is-arrested-and-arraigned-but-will-he-be-convicted/#comment-311396
The other thing is, if you are determined to kill yourself, a heart shot is the easiest way. Brain shot…generally fatal but if your hand slips, you may just end up a vegetable for the rest of your life. Medical means (Tylenol, Aspirin, Barbiturates) are by no means an immediate certainty. Tylenol is a nasty death, as is aspirin, besides someone could break in and save your life.
Though it’s interesting to see the rash of deaths listed…makes you wonder how interconnected they were and how afraid.
It’s also about what’s available. Most doctors, other than anesthesiologists, don’t have access to narcotics, barbiturates, etc, nearly as easy as the lay public thinks they do. For one thing, prescribing such drugs to oneself would certainly raise eyebrows at the pharmacy, and a doc is not likely to order a supply for his office unless he does procedures for which conscious sedation is indicated. Also, docs who do need such drugs for conscious sedation have to have all the state and federal regulatory licenses, which takes time. In other words, Bradstreet could have gotten the drugs, but it would have taken time. If you want to kill yourself now as a doc, unless you’re an anesthesiologist or do conscious sedation in your office, getting the drugs takes too long.
Tylenol is indeed particularly nasty because it usually doesn’t kill you right off the bat. What often happens is that you recover from the acute poisoning, but your liver has take a fatal hit, leading to to a nasty death from liver failure weeks later, unless you get a transplant.
Having been friends with a dentist who took his own life after a DUI, I understand how shame can affect someone. The choice of a gun isn’t surprising as many choose it for its lethality.
That people will spin things towards their own point of view isn’t surprising either, especially in this case where the conspiracy theories are all one sided [like here where Dr. Bradstreet is a victim as opposed to something like ex-military as police officers – where some say the conspiracy is to hire them so police become more militarized and others that they are not hired because they have knowledge to fight the gov’t]. So, if I wanted to invent a conspiracy I could just as easily craft one about the people making money off of his and others fake treatments as being responsible for the deaths.
I surfaced an article here about the other missing/dead alternative med doctors. Although it is not a well written article, it was the least speculative of the few I found and it contained a list of deaths and timelines in one place. I saw no reason to warn those here of what speculation it did indulge in because it is quite obvious in the piece in addition to not being the way way this blog rolls.
But I do think it is useful to look for a pattern in what appears to be a “cluster” of deaths if for no other reason than to try to figure out the identified murders that did occur.
Yeah, firearms are going to have a pretty strong showing in completed suicides due to their lethality. Of the 5 (I think) people I know who’ve committed suicide so far, 3 were with a gun, one was an OD, and one was with helium.
Aspirin, actually, is kind of hard to kill yourself with, going by anecdotal experience; a couple people I know attempted suicide by aspirin as teenagers. Tylenol, as Orac noted, is much nastier.
My, but this conversation is a bit dark!
Imagine what you could come up with if you tracked any field of employment nation-wide for over a month. “Fourth vet dies this month! Anti-rabies vaccine activists eyed carefully!”
Thanks to Orac for this update.
I’ve been following the case of one of the other “holistic” docs supposedly murdered by the Pharma Mafia (Teresa Sievers), and it is hard to tell what the local authorities are worse at, investigation or media management. Apparently there has still not been any officially confirmation of manner of homicide weeks after the killing (reportedly she was struck with a hammer), and the Lee County sheriff now says there is more evidence in the case than he’s ever seen before.
I conclude from that that he and his detectives are totally confused (and probably overwhelmed with tips from nutbars).
I thought about bringing the stories of those docs in, but the post was already getting long…
Yeah, I’ve had a few friends commit suicide or attempt to do so. One friend, a lab tech, did use the Tylenol method. She knew exactly what she was doing, and died about 5 days later. So I know about that one very well.
Yeah, starting with my dad (when I was 11!) I’ve become far too familiar with the phenomenon, including having attempted a couple of times myself. (I’m really bad at it.)
I’d like to lodge a complaint with the author of this story I’m stuck in, actually, that the theme is getting a little hackneyed and a lighter hand, in general, I think, is called for.
When I was in AP Psychology class we were told there is no good way to commit suicide. I wasn’t about to take that at face value. A classmate and I set upon trying to figure one out. Not because we had any intention of committing suicide but more of a challenge to such a definitive statement. We ran through any number of scenarios but there was always a flaw. Many years later while on the subject in a random conversation, I ran this past a friend and told her we spent a whole year at it and never did find a good way. She replied with great clarity “That’s because there isn’t supposed to be one”.
I’m not knowledgeable about the circumstances surrounding an “alternative” cluster of death, but one will probably never see their own treatments questioned as a contributing cause.
Bradstreet has (was?) treated himself and his widow with stem cells. His wife claimed a nearly instant cure of her severe anxiety and depression, as well as an improved marriage. All children with autism who were treated improved. Really a silly shameless (and stepfordish) promotional video from a stem cell clinic in Kiev featuring them both:
I dunno, the helium method seems pretty effective and painless; plus you get to say your last words in that funny helium voice. L-rd knows that death as a physiological process is never graceful, though, and eventually someone’s going to find your body.
@ JP:
I know that this might sound rather cavalier but why don’t you write about ALL of it? You have talent and perhaps the Muse will smile upon you if you dedicate yourself to the task of explanation of these horrors
…..True story: I once had to recite an entire poem publicly – in French yet- in which I portrayed the Muse who was really getting disgusted with her chosen artist because he wasn’t producing enough… for a performance artist’s presentation…
re writing up misery..
my friend who lost a family member to terrorism long ago has been writing about its aftermath partially as therapy ( which I edit, read, etc) and has just learned that a crappy writer somewhere is writing about the event, her family and quoting them from various sources WITHOUT any permission..
They are not happy at all.
It is interesting that “they” are targeting the little-known holistic/anti-vaccine doctors while the well-known and influential ones (Mercola, Wakefield, Wakefield and such) continue to make public appearances and statements.
It is also interesting that quacks like Erin Elizabeth at Health Nut News repeatedly says how scared she is for her life and that of Joe Mercola, the whole time maintaining a very public profile, blogging about the deaths of these doctors. If she was truly scared, wouldn’t she go into hiding?
Ok, I found your macabre humor about the squeaky voice somewhat funny but the method is not fool proof and do you really want to have possible brain damage for the rest of your life if it fails and you decide you want to live after all?
Speaking to the Tylenol exit, it has to be one of the worst I have ever seen. Working in a hospital there were at least one if not more in our ICU of those who had attempted suicide for every single month for the entire 12 years I worked there. I only know of one person to ever have died after receiving treatment and he was the one who wanted to live after he regained consciousness. Also note the treatments given are nasty (drinking acetylcysteine and/or activated charcoal), and G-d only knows what type of liver damage you’ll have to live with for the rest of your life.
Moral of the story: Don’t try this home, at work, on vacation or anywhere – with any method.
JP, my comment #33 was for you in case you haven’t figured that out.
Also, I agree with Denice Walter about the writing. It is almost universally helpful, and you are an exceptional writer.
@Denice:
Yeah, I’ve heard that suggestion a couple of times over the past year or two; most memorably at like 5 in the morning a year or so ago, standing on my balcony drinking bourbon with my Bosnian BFF. “You’ve gotta write this stuff down, man.”
@NaT:
Oh, I really was just joking; my humor can be pitch black at times, sorry about that. I’m sane enough right now during the day to keep any sort of means out of my apartment so I don’t have them at night. It’s also pretty clear that I suck at these things, and I’m aware that a seriously botched attempt could result in a worse fate than the one I’m already living. To quote Dorothy Parker (a soul sister of mine):
^ Not to mention that I have people relying on me at the moment, like a friend who just had a death in the family and is in the middle of packing up 10 years of her life to move to another state for a lecturing job. Technically I still owe her like 30 hours of RA work, too, so I’ve been pressed into service to take care of all the library books, scan important parts, organize documents, etc.
I know! It’s the most incompetent murder conspiracy ever!
Here’s a summary of the French-language article about the Swiss investigation. It concerns a clinic in Bussigny, Switzerland (Canton Vaud), run by First Immune, David Noakes’s operation. (The sidebar notes that another First Immune clinic in Brussels was the first Noakes business to fall under investigation; he originally was headquartered there, but moved to Guernesey, and later was shut down in the UK as well.) The clinic advertised itself chiefly for treating cancer (promising a remission of terminal cancer in as little as a week!) but also everything else from AIDS to hepatitis and cirrhosis to allergies and depression. In late 2014, 5 terminal cancer patients died at CHUV (the Vaud University Hospital). All were foreign nationals who had come to the First Immune clinic for treatment. The hospital found indications that they had been incorrectly treated. They are not saying anything more specific than that while the investigation is in progress, but whatever the evidence was that they gathered, it was enough to convince the médecin cantonal (chief medical authority for the canton) to lift patient privacy and refer the cases to law enforcement. Once his attention was drawn to the clinic, the médecin cantonal also decided to file charges of practicing unlicensed medicine and selling an unauthorized drug, GcMAF; he admitted that because First Immune had never applied for a license to practice medicine in Switzerland, the clinic “didn’t exist for us and we didn’t really know what was going on there.” Once law enforcement was brought into the case, they raided the clinic in March of 2015 and seized all of the equipment. The investigation is still ongoing and actual charges have not yet been filed.
JP, love the quote! Says it a lot better than my wordiness.
When you’re done helping your friend, would you help here? I am moving back to my college town with an 11 year accumulation of stuff which includes a lot of paperwork that I want to scan into the computer so i will never have to move it again unless it is from one flash drive to another.
Of course, I am just joking as I live across the country from you but you did give me a smile thinking about someone else involved in the same chores. Best wishes with it.
IIRC, this is the guy whose death conspiracy theorists tried to link to the capture of the Charleston church murderer that same week, never mind that the locations are about 80 km apart. I’m not surprised that his family doesn’t want to believe it’s suicide; down that road lie many “was there something I could have done?” recriminations. But if you aren’t one of his immediate family, why would the fact that he is the target of a federal probe not be sufficient? One of my relatives has worked with his local US Attorney’s office, and from him I know that if the feds have made you the target of a criminal probe, they are at least 99% sure they can get a conviction. It’s not so farfetched for a doctor to think that federal prison is a fate worse than death–maybe a Club Fed type prison wouldn’t be, but Supermax would.
“I know! It’s the most incompetent murder conspiracy ever!”
They’re just throwing you off the trail. Every conspirator is brilliant. Or, it could always be a cabal of Mercola, Wakefield & Co. trying to lessen the competition.
Scary that I think like this, isn’t it?
There’s something bugging me with this paragraph:
“I know it was murder,” the Immuno Biotech CEO said. “Dr. Bradstreet stated what we all know: that the MMR vaccine causes autism,” repeating a claim often wielded by anti-vaccine activists that’s been totally debunked. “And he was an expert witness in many court cases in the U.S.A. providing testimony to that effect. MMR is a multibillion dollar vaccine and this [GcMAF] hurts the profits of the MMR drug companies and that is why he was killed.”
That doesn’t make any sense! How could GcMAF hurt the profits of MMR vaccine sales? Are these products substitutes? Do they claim that GcMAF cures autism AND MMR? Do children with autism need more MMR vaccines and, thus, would GcMAF cause the demand for it to decrease?
Uh oh. Sorry. I see Orac was well ahead of me on everything. This is what I get for not carefully reading the entire thread because of my slow internet connection due to the Jade Helm internet shut-down conspiratorial plan going on right now (yes, I’m kidding).
If there is something to the doctor’s deaths, I’ll wait for the Forensic Files episode. In any event, I feel for the grieving, and I hope that this doesn’t further entrench those who already feel they are under siege.
@ JP:
You have to do something about those nights!
I have ideas.
Well, if you DON’T bring someone home with you:
( that can work)
at least keep the place well-lit and have either a radio, television, computer going all the time-
it’s good to hear a human voice when you’re alone even if it just is the news.
Have projects to work on that you can pick up and put down.
( I’m in the midst of writing something… for a month)
Have an exercise regime ( videos? computer?)
Music.
Movies.
And certainly there’s always someone around RI despite the hour and timezone.
#9, let’s not refer to people who take their own lives as cowards. Bradstreet might have been a lot of things, including a coward, but committing suicide doesn’t automatically make you one.
JP, I’m sorry about your Dad. My Dad committed suicide as well. He was a physician. He was terminally ill and wanted to go on his own terms, minus the pain. No coward soul was his…
@Delphine:
It was a confluence of things with my dad, some of which I actually didn’t know about until a couple of years ago, and which would have been nice to know when I was going through it. People don’t tell 11 year olds things, though, and on top of that I had a tendency to sort of blend into the wall at that age, which people find hard to believe now. So you can imagine all the things I had in my head for years. I honestly think he thought everyone would be better off without him, which was REALLY not the case.
BUT BUT BUT…
the targetted ones continue to make public appearances because they are after all, BRAVE mavericks- fearless in the face of danger, intrepid in their truth tellingness.
Do they buckle; do they quake in terror?
No no no! They stand up to oppression.
As Gary Null tells it:
the black ops fatty who confessed his assignment to him TOLD him to be careful, watch out for dark alleys, cars with malfunctioning brakes and shady ladies.. “You’re on the hit list”
but did he slink off, away from the public eye to live in safety?
Never! He became MORE public and even challenged his would-be assassins.
He reported upon their every malfeasance: each crime and misdemeanor was investigated and PUBLISHED!
@Denice:
Yeah, the only thing is that I’m supposed to be trying to get more sleep, and better sleep. I had been having a few drinks most nights and able to fall asleep, but then waking up, which I guess is common and also alcohol makes your sleep garbage. But now I can’t fall asleep. If I can’t fall asleep for too long, though, I’ve been giving up and getting up and doing various things. I’m not sure if this productive or counterproductive.
One thing that does sometimes help with falling asleep – besides the Trazodone I have, which I think helps some but often enough it doesn’t work – is to listen to talk radio (BBC, NPR) or podcasts. It’s something that my brain focuses on enough to quiet my own ruminations, but it’s not a bright TV screen or anything keeping me up.
My parents are pharmacists and they’ve known 5 or 6 pharmacists who’ve committed suicide, only one used drugs and she died in the hospital pharmacy on the night shift. Of the others 2 used fire arms, 2 hung themselves and one was suspected since he drove directly into a bridge abutment.
Am I right in thinking that this…
…means that the plasma they were using wasn’t screened for HIV, hepatitis, or anything else?
Because if so, how awful.
Thanks for the offer but I don’t need to email you privately, Dr. Jay. I just need to know that you admit that you f&cked up. The manner in which you f&cked up is a matter of record. Maybe in hindsight, kicking Christine Maggiore in her entitled “but my kid doesn’t do daycare/eat Lunchables!” ass would have made for a good start.
And thanks for your advice on night terrors. That actually makes sense, given that from what I’ve read thus far, it’s a transition from sleep cycle thing. Right now our solution on the 1-2 nights a week this happens is to bring her into bed with us. I am in favour of bedsharing if it’s done safely but she hasn’t slept with us in 2 years and I am done with that stage of my life. And besides, I can’t get back to sleep. And it’s upsetting for my husband, though not really for Delphinette, who has no clue in the morning that she’s turned into a miniature of Linda Blair in The Exorcist at some point during the night. We’ll try that. Maybe we will get more sleep that way.
I think the reason that people balked at believing in suicide is that in the entertainment media when someone kills themselves, they shoot themselves in the head. Of course the media does it that way because it looks spectacular, not because it’s the most common way of doing it.
Back in April the British ‘League of Nerds’ podcast interviewed one of Fiona O’Leary’s supporters, the interview focusses on the practice of using bleach enemas to cure autsim, but GcMAF also gets mentioned at one point.
Sigh, Wrong thread. Jesus wept.
When I told Mr Woo about this, he immediately loved the murder instead idea (of course). I had another theory for the shot to the heart. It might sound silly, but perhaps he wanted his family to be able to bury him without too much fuss? He might have been worried about making too much of a mess.
A place I was working a very thoughtful gun suicide made sure he made the area easy to clean up afterwards. It is kind of strange how a person’s mind works when it gets to that place. Nothing of what I’ve read sounds strange through the lens of suicide.
@JP – if it is the right time of the day (i.e., after dark), the Nightvale podcast usually puts me to sleep before it gets to the weather.
Sorry, but it is obvious why the Holistic Doctor Murder Conspiracy has so far targeted relatively obscure figures, and not giants like Mercola and Null. There’d be far too much uproar if the Pharma Mafia took out those leaders; better to pick off the lesser lights sneakily and gradually gut holistic care before the faithful can catch on.
But thanks to the vigilance of the altie community, our sinister plot has unraveled. 🙁
JP–
As I understand it (and I am not a doctor, nor any other sort of expert here) getting up and doing something else for a bit if you can’t fall asleep can be a good idea, but don’t look at a computer or TV screen or other bright lights. So, read a book, listen to music or a podcast, knit, do puzzles, call a friend in another timezone, even make tuna salad (as a friend of mine’s mother used to do).
Also, warm non-caffeinated drinks can be a help: I sometimes stretch that far enough to include hot cocoa, if I’m not in the mood for herb tea.
From everything I’ve read, nitrogen asphyxiation seems like just about the ideal way to die. I imagine one could find any number of nooks or crannies that could the gas long enough to complete the deed. Heck, it happens so quickly and do seamlessly that a clothes dryer with the duct sealed off might do the trick. Something to take edge off the anxiety, maybe something to make one drowsy, and it’s about as close to a peaceful death as I can imagine.
From everything I’ve read, nitrogen asphyxiation seems like just about the ideal way to die. I imagine one could find any number of nooks or crannies that could hold the gas long enough to complete the deed. Heck, it happens so quickly and so seamlessly that a clothes dryer with the duct sealed off might do the trick. Something to take edge off the anxiety, maybe something to make one drowsy, and it’s about as close to a peaceful death as I can imagine.
I acknowledge that the main downside to this method is materials acquisition, and that suicide by firearm is still more convenient.
Which strikes me as an oddly macabre way to describe suicide.
I’ve served my community for a number of years, sometimes aiding in body recovery. Yes, people shoot themselves in the chest, and any other sort of grotesque manner possible (though typically males are more apt to use a weapons or hanging to complete one). Females go for meds more, and cars.
Suicide is about the irrational mind, many times without an explanation to friends, family members, or their kids. Sometimes they try and take their family/pets with them. The intent to die overrides any rational thought.
Rourke Decker@ 58 & 59 (double post) is correct that nitrogen gas provides a painless exit. This is discussed in some circles having to do with death with dignity. I’d suggest we not go into it further here, as a) widespread publication of the details could facilitate suicides that might otherwise not have occurred, and b) that may result in restrictions on the availability of one or more necessary components for those who have an uncontroversial need for a dignified exit, such as if they are in end-stage terminal disease with truly intractable pain.
Re. conspiracies: The search for a sense of meaning about a death. For CTers, it’s not sufficient that a suicide means only that the person took their exit rather than face some kind of unpleasant situation (family breakup, criminal charges, whatever), or that they had a psychiatric ailment (e.g. depression) or a random accident of some kind (automobile or whatever). Instead, there is an element of projecting personal agency into the cause of death, i.e. “someone” did it, and the victim can’t be that “someone,” so it has to be a motivated outside party. For the ideologically motivated, the outside party is their long-standing ideological nemesis. QED all that remains is to put names and faces on the killers.
True Gray Squirrel. I was hesitant to even discuss the preparation by the suicide I was acquainted with. Someone who survived a very intentional attempt told me that as much as their brain wanted to die their body seemed very hard-wired to survive. The majority of us can be harder to kill than we might expect.
That doesn’t make any sense!
Well, no, but this is David Noakes. Back when he was still in the UK Independence Party, the other members of the party were concerned that he made them look crazy. “Mad as a box of frogs” was the phrase they used.
an Irish woman named Fiona O’Leary to begin investigating First Immune and complaining to UK health authorities.
As Graham noted at #52, O’Leary has also been a stalwart in the campaign to keep bleach enemata and MMS out of the British Isles.
I suspect that tip-offs to the UK authorities came from a number of sources. Noakes was probably pissing off a lot of people in Guernsey with his FIrst Immune business. The old-money squirarchy there do not look kindly upon brash parvenus, and smoothing ruffled feathers is not Noakes’ strong point. Nor do they like people who call attention to Guernsey (and its tax-haven status), whereas “calling attention” is the thing that Noakes is best at doing.
we were told there is no good way to commit suicide
There are good ways to euthanase. Or so I hear from a friend.
I take it that you’re speaking from a perspective appropriate to AP psychology, which I’m surprised even exists.
I find the argument that Bradstreet could not have commited suicide because he shot himself simply nonsense. Suicides are conducted with the tools most at hand. Waiting a few days or weeks to get hold of enough pharmaceuticals is simply not an option.
On commiting suicide, having access to a laboratory chemical store, I can offer several certain ways to commit suicide. They may not be particularly pleasant, but highly effective and most importantly quick.
Yvette @32: Obviously they are targeting the people who have effective treatments, and leaving the outright quacks like Mercola, Wakefield, and Elizabeth to continue discrediting the whole movement.
Apparently, Dan O ( AoA) thinks that Cia Parker’s words of wisdom outweigh his own this Saturday…
she has a “novel idea”:
why not have doctors read books recommended by parents that inform about the dangers of vaccines and the reality of vaccine injury since parents themselves may be required to listen to an educational lecture by physicians in some places?
It could be done through a meeting like those of a book club.
Books like (the aptly named) Judy Converse’s “When Your Doctor is Wrong” and Eisenstein’s tome. Others like those of Neustaedter, Fraser, Handley and Blaxill/ Olmsted are mentioned as are Dr Jay and ‘Evidence of Harm’.
Parents should be heard!
Remember that Dr Offit REFUSED to debate Toni Bark..
Parker wonders why that is.
Oh F@ck ! She stole MY line.
In other alternate universe news:
Mike Adams is readying his new search engine, Good Gopher, which will effectively filter out mainstream media, governmental propaganda and corporate shillery in order to clear the information highway entirely for The Truth to educate The People and free them from Ignorance, Commercialism and Misinformation.
Yes, we’re on the Brink of a New Era.
As we are quite frequently, according to Mikey.
edit:
through MEETINGS like those
#69 Denice Walter
she has a “novel idea”: why not have doctors read books recommended by parents that inform about the dangers of vaccines and the reality of vaccine injury
Bad idea, the USA would lose too many doctors: apoplexy, dying from laughing too hard, or in jail after murdering one or more parents.
Actually, it might not be a bad idea, but not in the way she thinks. If doctors read those books, they’d be familiar with the pseudoscientific crap arguments antivaxers use and be more prepared to counter them.
“I take it that you’re speaking from a perspective appropriate to AP psychology, which I’m surprised even exists.”
Had to have been; that was the context and I haven’t looked for a “good way” in years.
AP Psych is the easiest thing to develop into an AP course which is why it was one of the first. For me personally, I had an interest in psychology, yes, but I also wanted to graduate early.
“They may not be particularly pleasant, but highly effective and most importantly quick.”
No pain, easy to access, no time to have regret, 100% lethal, no mess to clean up afterwards, no one else involved; the list narrows.
But I’ll let you win the argument if you have to resort to specifics. I really don’t want to know or to see them posted on the web.
“Actually, it might not be a bad idea, but not in the way she thinks. If doctors read those books, they’d be familiar with the pseudoscientific crap arguments antivaxers use and be more prepared to counter them.”
Totally agree. Especially in this age of patient satisfaction scores, you don’t want to be laughing in patient’s faces.
ChrisP, my apologies. Never mind me at #75. It goes back to an earlier exchange that you were not involved in, and that wasn’t even contentious, but if it were to keep going, I wouldn’t want to see specific methods.
Also, it helps not to land here after being on Twitter. Almost everything there is contentious.
Sorry Denice Walter, does not compute. One cannot use the words “Cia Parker” and “words of wisdom” in the same sentence.
Elsewhere Cia Parker has explaining to me that in the 2011 measles epidemic in Europe the death rate was 1.5 in 10,000.
“In Europe in 2011, there were over 26,000 reported cases of measles, with nine deaths and fifteen cases of possibly permanent damage. That would mean 1.5 deaths per 10,000 cases and 2.5 cases in those 10,000 with permanent damage.”
You simply couldn’t make this stuff up.
“[GcMFA] hurts the profits of the MMR drug companies and that is why he was killed”
I don’t get it. If autism has a cure, then wouldn’t more people get MMR since there would be one less reason to fear it?
Silly me I guess, trying to apply logic to an antivaxxer
“…doctors don’t kill themselves that way are complete nonsense based on misinformation about physician suicide”
Silly orac, don’t you know that ALL of those doctors were murdered by the FDA for finding out its dirty secrets?
This is the third week running that there’s been no “Weekly Wrap,” following the NOI item.
I’m thinking that D.-0- might be considering the ol’ rope trick.
effectively filter out mainstream media, governmental propaganda and corporate shillery
I realize we are talking about Mike Adams here, but where does he draw the line between “propaganda” or “shillery” and actual information? If he takes this to its logical extreme, users won’t be able to find a weather report–that would be “government propaganda” from the National Weather Service (or its local equivalent for non-US users). Nor would the users be able to comparison shop over the web, because they have to pick through corporate-sourced information to find out which widget best meets their needs and which vendor has the best price. Rule 34 isn’t the only reason why web filters fail.
@ Narad:
Oh I know.
@ Eric Lund:
He draws the line between so-called propaganda/ shillery and actual information wherever it most benefits his ego and bank accounts .
Good Gopher- g-d where does he get these names?- is just another of his attention-whoring efforts to get views and thus, possible customers for his products. He had his ‘lab’, his encyclopaedia, his ‘inner circle’, his land schemes and MLM, TV, his interactive platforms, his 3D printing nonsense, his ‘farms’,,, it’s frigging endless!
Personally, I think that his forays into botch economics are the most egregious BS with which he’s soiled the internet-
Since 2008, most people in North America and Europe have been (rightly) concerned about the state of the world economy and worry about their own future. Even me. People have lost money, jobs and a sense of security.
He, like the other idiot, repeatedly strike up fear about the future- Null says the NEXT meltdown with be much worse- Mike says people must get ready for food shortages and riots in the streets-
They both give horrendously stupid advice. The recent situation in Greece has fuelled their respective fires as they whoop:
” It will happen HERE NEXT!”
They use their power over their audiences to cause unnecessary pain to increase their own wealth and power over others. And they think of themselves as humanitarians ( Null) and spiritual/Christian ( Adams). Sadists.
G-d I hate these idiots.
It’d be pretty funny if it actually used Gopher, which might still be in his l33t haxx0r wheelhouse.
Well, I should have known in advance that nothing original would ever emanate from Mikey’s prosaic noggin.
AND yes, I am a sybil:
a long time ago, I predicted that Jake’s …er.. *work* would someday appear at Natural News..
*Et VOILA!*
Today NN links to his 3 year + supposed expose of Orac.
So Jake is now a triple threat, having been featured at the sinkholes of Bolen, Null and Adams.
^ How can one even read at the Natural News website much less find anything on it? It looks they are using css to mimic circa 1995 html to deliver a presentation that I would image as the end result of Kmart’s site running into the Drudge Report.
Has anyone ever seen any part of this empire of Mikey’s? How does anyone know that there is (or was) a lab, farm, etch?
How do we know he’s not operating out of a warehouse on the east side of Detroit?
@ shay :
I’ve heard that NN is based in Cedar Creek, Texas, outside Austin.
From the photos of his so-called lab, 3D print farm and hydroponic farm** they could indeed be located in a warehouse – but probably not in Orac’s fair city of origin. Too far a commute for him.
** it appears that he does own land from his never-ending photos and videos of animals, vegetables, fruits and shrubbery ( weedery?) .
Although I suppose it would fairly easy to photograph anywhere and mis-represent it as his own. BUT he does have money, so those of his bent of mind would NEED to own land and play homestead-boy.
“Clearly, “they” feared what Bradstreet might reveal about their conspiracy in a public trial.”
Because he was so impressive as a witness at the Omnibus Autism Proceeding?
They don’t want to admit that he committed suicide because that’s means he was about to be exposed for something real. Could be something as mundane as another bankruptcy. But who knows.
The only person I know who killed himself was a doctor. He was a very talented radiologist and he used a gun.
One time he posted a photo essay or bucolic splendor. Since I have my own chickens, part of me hopes they weren’t just licensed from one of many cheap sites.
The chicken thing has been an anxious blessing this year. Feed is slightly more expensive, but the bird flu issues have made eggs really pricey, so as long as nothing infects my flock, I get fresh pasture-ranged eggs, supposedly the best nutrient profile and most humane method of acquiring eggs. All of our “neighbors” (close states, that is) have reported outbreaks, which means culling of entire flocks, etc. I get attached to everything living here (even snakes and spiders), so I admit to being very worried about my little farm, possibly a lot more than Mike Adams would be – my birds are mostly named and it isn’t some postured lifestyle I am marketing, just a result of a weak moment in the feed store near a cage filled with a whole bunch of fluffy, peeping baby birds.
JP
I recommend the Astronomycast Podcast. Both hosts (Fraser Cain and Pamela Gay) have very calm soothing voices. They could announce a kliometre wide meteor was going to strike the earth next week and you would think “that’s interesting”.
Well, this is fascinating. I randomly picked a condition I don’t research, etc., and put it in Good Gopher, and had an email in my inbox about that disease and alternatives less than ten minutes later. I am on the NN email list to keep up with what he is posting. I don’t even think my regular search engine is this transparent in is umm behavior. Wow.
@ Mrs Woo
That’s some very reactive business model.
But wait, did you have to feed your e-mail address to the GGopher, or did you have some NN-related account open?
Or did the GGopher track your e-mail down by sniffing around your browser and your other personal accounts?
I’m not an internet specialist, but In the latter case, there is some serious breach of privacy.
Those soft peeping baby chicks are hard to resist. My mom once got one for my brothers (pre-KM). Problem was it grew up into a rooster and they lived in an apartment building with neighbors who did not appreciate the all natural solar powered alarm clock with no off switch.
They found a lovely family farm with a flock who could use a rooster. Poor thing continued to think it was a people and kept escaping the chicken area and heading over to the front porch of the house and wait to be let in.
UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE
We’re now up to at least 8 (EIGHT!) “dead and disappeared doctors”:
http://allnewspipeline.com/8_Disappeared_Dead_Doctors.php
“An associate of Bradstreet stated under anonymity: “I know enough about Jeff Bradstreet to know his state of mind. He was a sound thinker! He was prudent and calculated. Acting out on the spur of the moment and deciding to kill himself is like a joke. He was a jet pilot!…He was a genius, a very very smart man who would not have killed himself over this on such short notice.”
So suicide was possible, just not right away. Good enough for me!
Connect the dots, sheeple!!!
Hmmmmmm, if I had a pound for every time I heard a friend or relative of someone I was assessing following an overdose say something along the lines of “They didn’t mean it”, “They couldn’t do something like that” or whatever, I would have quite a lot of pounds…
it appears that he does own land from his never-ending photos and videos of animals, vegetables, fruits and shrubbery ( weedery?) .
Texas is notoriously permissive about what you build on your land[1], so Mike may have a warehouse on his property. Or he could, as they say in Texas, be “all hat, no cattle”.
[1]As long as you comply with setback requirements and such, but if you have acreage, that’s easy to do. You could, for instance, build a fertilizer plant on a lot that’s surrounded by houses, as long as your front lawn is big enough.
Eric, he truly HAS no cattle, as he explains in his recent article about ‘abundance in Texas’-
when apocalypse/ chaos/ meltdown occurs, he’ll have plenty of fruit to barter to cattlemen for their products- including bones for bone broth!
He does HOWEVER have goats and chickens.
What is it about rich people and boutique farms?
The following twitter conversation left me feeling really discouraged. There’s a never-ending source of marks for the grifters.
I offered to discuss the issue of “what makes a treatment ‘alternative’ on email — not really suitable for twitter’s brevity, but she declined.
The MTHFR stuff just makes me so low.
LIz Ditz,
Perhaps one day “worried mom” will get there but I hope not with too much damage done. All of this makes me low.
Alternative Medicine (And Poor Critical Thinking Skills) Almost Killed Me.
#drbradstreet saved many kids. Not up for debate
There is little you can do when crucial questions become articles of faith.
Well, it’s not like jet pilots ever commit suicide. It’s not like geniuses ever commit suicide. It’s not like prudent, calculating individuals ever make a choice to end their lives.
Denice Walter wrote:
The same frequency of bucolic romanticism as humbler people combined with the money to have someone else do the hard work bit?
@ Andreas Johansson:
I’m sure you’re correct.
Actually, about 50-100 miles outside of the Great City of [redacted], there are scores of boutique farms/ vineyards, some of which are owned by well-to-do poseurs and others by
( probably) middle-class folk who may work at it themselves – the latter tend to involve goats, bees, orchards or exceedingly precious vegetables/ berries usually pickled or turned into jam/ jelly respectively .
Well, it’s not like jet pilots ever commit suicide
“When it’s time, I want to go quietly, not screaming and carrying on like my passengers.”
I’ve been depressed.
Really depressed.
Depressed enough that I was preparing to end my life, so I know what it feels like. And believe me, nobody around me knew. Thing is, a lot of times a depressed person tries very hard to pretend not to be depressed for a whole bunch of reasons, ranging from being embarassed about it to hoping that if you pretend hard enough maybe you’ll really not be depressed anymore. Eventually you realize that isn’t working, and that’s when you might actually go ahead and say to heck with it and end it all. For me, I didn’t see any point in letting anyone know. I didn’t believe there was anything they could do to help me, and knowing would only distress them. There are *layers* of denial that can keep a person from being obviously, stereotypically depressed.
And caring for a person can drain you. I would never say that it can drive a person to suicide, but it’s not exactly going to help either. (This is right up there with “don’t buy a puppy or get pregnant in order to cure your depression”.) And it may make it harder for folks to recognize when you are depressed, since they’ll just chalk it up to caregiver burnout. Being a caregiver can also be isolating, which again makes surviving depression worse.
None of this is *because* of the caregiving; it’s just one more burden to carry at one time.
I think it’s very sad Bradstreet couldn’t go on. If as seems very likely he really did kill himself, then now it seems there’s a double tragedy, as his closest supporters *still* refuse to see the pain he was struggling through. I guess this shows another way that caregiving can make it harder to get help for depression; people are spending so much time putting you on a pedestal for having taken on this noble task that they completely fail to see how much pain you’re enduring while doing it.
I obviosuly never knew Bradstreet, so I don’t really know what could’ve been going through his mind. But I can imagine myself in that sort of situation, suddenly looking around at all the people who praise my campaigns but don’t see me at all and despairing.
GcMAF is now sold as Goleic for both autism and cancer.
These are two of dozens of sites that claim to sell this stuff.
Noakes himself is still selling the stuff at € 450 for a 2.2ml vial.
And they call vaccine makers profiteers.
@KayMarie #96 if you get on Facebook, Maria Elena Chickenfeathers Johnson taught me more about chickens than most of us should know. A bonded chicken is often a lot of fun, and sometimes a curse. Maria refused to roost with the chickens (she acted overly picked on, and we determined finally she had some sort of respiratory weakness. She died young). Since lone chickens on the dark are owl/fox/raccoon/possum/etc., food, we finally ended up bringing her inside and buying her a flight suit to keep mess under control. After she died it took two years to look at her page without crying. As flock animals, they want to be in pretty close proximity constantly – if she “lost” me, I would hear about it.
@Helianthus #95 – it was within twenty minutes… I think my Disqus uses the one email (it is my “junk email” address) it arrived in, and it is the email where I receive NN newsletters. It was the search topic showing up as an email topic so suddenly after searching it on his GG site. I went to GG from my email, tried a search to see how much he leaves out and where he directs people, and had an email that directed me to various cures and treatments for that disease a short time after doing a search for it.
Correlation doesn’t equal causation, but that just struck me as a little odd.
Calli Arcle @ 108
Bradstreet may have been someone struggling with pain and depression,but a lot of us think he was just a coward afraid to face what justice was about to deal out to him.There is nothing noble about Bradstreet.Bradstreet was a fraud and a con man who profiteered off of desperate families.And he did so peddling a dangerous and deadly treatment.We may never know how much death and damage GcMAF has caused.The people who put Bradstreet on a pedestal,are the same ones who treat Andrew Wakefield like a god wherever he speaks.
@Calli Arcale – I have dealt with recurrent depression and suicidal ideation since fairly early in childhood (beginning primary school). It is a rough road.
Maybe I am growing cynical. I suspect his suicide was more about being caught and going to jail – a worry of being considered a fraud when things came to light (ironic; he should have considered Wakefield). He couldn’t handle people no longer believing him benevolent healer sacrificing for all the vaccine-injured children.
On boutique farming – I keep wondering how many people he employs to “run” his. Feeding and egg gathering is the easy part.
@ Cali
And blockquote fail.
First paragraph is from Cali, the following part is mine.
Strangely, I’ve found that the rumored sudden cheerfulness that is supposed to occur after one is resolute about a specific endpoint never showed up.
Here’s something for admirers of shamelessness and opportunism: A troika of Italian charlatans (and Bradstreet allies) are rushing to print with his edited Collected Works.
https://www.facebook.com/RememberingDrBradstreet/photos/pb.655557617878003.-2207520000.1437228502./663620637071701/?type=1&theater
@ Delphine
IKR
Just a few months after an airline pilot committed suicide by ramming the French Alps with his plane and all of his unwilling passengers.
We could add “clowns” to the list – it’s not like cheerful, joking people to commit suicide. We could ask Achille Zavatta, except he is not here anymore…
That’s one hell of a “cover design.”
Roger:
Oh that is quite likely, of course; nobody said only brave people get depressed. (I am not a very brave person myself, and both times I got close to suicide, it was over stupid things like being found out. In my case, being found out that I hadn’t been doing my homework. Depressed people aren’t very good at weighing the importance of things properly.) This isn’t something I did while depressed, but somebody else I know who got very close to suicide was also at the crux of a closing web as his network of lies came together and revealed his misdeeds — that’s another thing that certainly doesn’t help when you’re depressed, and in a bit of almost Shakespearean poignancy, it’s usually brought about in part by the depression as well. I mentioned the layers of denial that can surround a depressed person; one way to try and keep that bold face on is to build up a castle of lies around you so that people will praise you. An awful lot of people do that, and the irony is it doesn’t really help because of course on some level you always end up remembering that they’re praising your fiction rather than your person.
And Mrs Woo nails that here:
Helianthus:
Thank you so much for the kind words. 😉 I have not been clinically depressed for a long time. Not since before I met my husband, which I don’t think is coincidence; he gives me perspective.
YES!!! I keep a copy of “The Downward Spiral” on all my devices, so I can have it handy for when I get like that. It really helps. The worst depressive episode I’ve had since meeting my husband was about seven years ago. It didn’t last long enough to qualify as clinical, but my metric for the severity of depression is how far I get through the album before I hit that point of sudden clarity at the bottom of the well. I actually made it to “Hurt” that time. Back before I met my husband, I’d have to go on to “Pretty Hate Machine” or “Broken” to finish it off.
I think I read the same article! It’s what changed my mind on things like suicide barriers. I used to think they were futile, but stories like that showed me that no, suicide is actually usually pretty impulsive, and if you just delay them a bit, they hit that moment of clarity before they actually finish themselves off. There was also an interview with a woman who survived jumping from the High Bridge in St Paul. It’s very high, and very scenic, and like other high and scenic bridges has seen its share of suicides. She wasn’t planning on doing it until she was driving up it. She parked her car and jumped off, and instantly decided that this was not really what she wanted. She hit the rocks at the bottom, hundreds of feet down, and amazingly survived. A tugboat captain saw her and radioed for help.
Narad:
Didn’t for me, either, though I had a sense of relief. Not so much as the relief I felt once the thing I was trying to avoid facing happened and ended up not being so terrible after all, though.
RE: suicide
Having been hospitalized for suicide attempts myself, a doctor once gave my family and me a packet about understanding the mentality of suicidal people. It said something like, suicidal ideation is so far outside the normal human experience that it is pretty much impossible for a non-suicidal person to empathise with. I don’t know if I fully agree with that but I thought of that when reading this. It is terribly difficult for families to come to terms with suicide because it is so hard to comprehend. I feel sorry for Bradstreet’s family that people are really feeding this conspiracy angle*. I think it will make it far more difficult than it already is for them to come to terms with his suicide and hinder the greiving process for them.
*and for their loss as well. Quack or not I’d not wish death on anyone.
Calli Arcale@119
My favorite of these kinds of stories is that of Don Ritchie, the ‘Angel of the Gap’.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Ritchie
I truly appreciate how all of you have discussed this issue: you are doing a service to others. It’s important.
I live near a suicide magnet- a famous bridge- that has had its share of both successful attempts and ‘failures’. It has taken years to get a barrier project implemented and it’ll take
even more for it to be completed.
I have read in another forum — and of course I can’t remember where — that Bradstreet has an autistic son, that he claimed to have cured his son’s autism, but that the young man is in fact living in a residential facility. I don’t know if this is mean-spirited speculation or that it’s been confirmed*.
I don’t subscribe to Jay Gordon’s theory that having an autistic child is a reason to commit suicide, but if Bradstreet finally acknowledged that his son was in fact, not “cured” could this have been a factor?
(*like reading on Yahoo! that the KY county clerk who is refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples — because it’s against her religion — has been married four times).
@ shay:
I think I read somewhere** that his son ‘graduated high school’ – not that that rules out institutionalisation.
** I only looked at a few sites involving him.
I never found this very helpful myself. I remember once, I think in my first year of grad school, a colleague and friend was trying to be helpful and said that when she gets depressed, she likes to read Sylvia Plath or something, and I was just thinking, “That is TERRIBLE advice! If I didn’t already want to put my head in the oven, I would afterward.” I’m pretty sure our definitions of “depressed” are different, though.
I don’t know about cheerfulness, but on Saturday night I sort of snapped, and was up all night crying, and probably would have been screaming except for consideration of the neighbors. At some point things calmed a bit, and I was sort of dispassionately considering suicide, like, well, my emotional landscape is pretty much made up of various gradations of pain*, and here are X Y and Z ways in which I am a f*ckup, and maybe I am just done.
Somehow just having the option seriously on the table was a bit of a relief. I think I was eventually even able to get a couple hours of sleep.
*Although “hahaha” is also in there, and, well – I dunno if “drunk” and “high” count as emotions.
It is also possible that the head virus is emotionally retconning the past, and doing the equivalent of retconning to the future; actually, this is probably pretty likely. The Zoloft is at least kicking in and taking the worst edge off the anxiety, and I’m starting to get that SSRI feeling like the contrast has been turned up on a TV set, which I seem to remember as a precursor to an actual improvement in mood.
@ JP:
I think that if- during the time it’s happening- you can review past fluctuations of emotion/ misery that you’ve lived through and come to the conclusion that you’ve been ‘there’ before and things later changed- that the lows are not eternal but something that CAN improve- might be important.
A big overview is helpful – I found this to be true for myself and others during the Great Crash of ’08- ’09- I had people looking at stock price charts..it won’t stay THERE.
JP,
I hope you are not struggling through this all on your own. That is why all those people you had such a good meeting with recently are there. It isn’t a matter of just sucking things up.
-btw-
I should mention that I have experienced minor depression/ dysthemia myself which comes and goes. Never been a transformative issue for me but definitely an influence on how I view the world.
Unfortunately, I seem to be related to and/ or involved with many people who do have more classical symptoms
@NaT:
Oh, I saw the psychiatrist yesterday and mentioned it; he told me to please let him know right away if I actually get to a planning stage. I’d be hard pressed not to oblige, wouldn’t want to f*ck up his week or anything.
Also got the dosage upped.
Starting, stopping and dosage changes of SSRIs are always very sensitive times. I am not sure if you saying you don’t what to F-up his weekend is out of anger or grace (since you seem to have a big heart) but there are more than Vulcan like doctors to support you through this. I include those here too but they are not immediately present with you and sometimes that makes a big difference.
That was a joke, sort of, but if I’m honest with myself, I’d probably ruin a lot of peoples’ weeks.
He’s actually a pretty nice guy, and I actually managed to make him laugh yesterday; I enjoy that sort of challenge.
That’s ok. Sometimes it is hard to tell from the written word what someone means which is why there are all those email classes in business.
Back on topic, I find it helpful to remember that sometimes it is the side effect of the medication impacting our thinking and not actually an outgrowth of anything about us. If it passes great but if it doesn’t then follow up with your doctor.
I love that you enjoy the challenge of making your doctor laugh. I’ve always kind of liked that challenge myself.
Well, beyond the Zoloft, I also pretty much quit drinking cold turkey, although I did have a few at a birthday party last week. I also decided it was a good time to start meditating seriously again*, which can sometimes actually make things more painful in the short term.
So yeah, kind of an emotional roller-coaster at the moment, and the general exhaustion probably isn’t helping.
*Including actually getting myself to the nice little Zen Temple in town. I had been in self-imposed exile for a couple years out of embarrassment at being incredibly f*cked up, which was dumb. Everyone was really nice (of course) and the people who know me were glad to see me. Haju had a few people introduce themselves to me, announcing that “Jamie was sitting with us before some of YOU whippersnappers, she just went MISSING for a couple years, the silly m*therf*cker.”
Okay, I’m pretty sure she didn’t say “m*therf*cker,” but you get the general idea.
So this is a decidedly meditation naive question but do people ever fall asleep while mediating? I am thinking that if you are really tired*, this might happen and that may not be a bad thing.
*Asked by someone with excessive daytime sleepiness residual to sleep apnea.
Some people do; there was a young she-monk back at the Zen Center in Portland who used to get teased about it. (She is all growed up now and running a little zendo of her own in Cedar Hills.)
I never really did, though, even during retreats when we started at 4:30 or 5 in the morning or whatever. I usually find it to be more stimulating than anything, although it’s not something that will specifically keep me awake if I do it in the evening.
“ I usually find it to be more stimulating than anything…
This amazes me. I don’t know why; it just does.
Depressed people aren’t very good at weighing the importance of things properly.
Or from another perspective, depression will lie to you about anything.
Buswell recounts that the “warning stick” is in frequent use during the Korean winter meditation retreat.
It was in occasional use at the Olympia Zen Center, as I recall, but one signaled that one wanted it, rather than being surprised. It can relieve tension in the neck and shoulders, I’ve heard, but I don’t have any personal experience.
They just have an abrupt change of mantra to “zzzzzzzzzzz”.
There is NO MANTRA in zazen. 😛
Then clearly they’ve also switched to a different school of mediation and acquired one.
If the Wikipedia article can be believed, it appears one method of zazen meditation involves solving Sudoku. Would the 1 star or 5 star boards be better for mediation?
^Even though the W—pedia article says that sometimes there is for beginners. I have never encountered this, although counting breaths up to 10 is a pretty common instruction for beginners.
Thanks everyone. I think from the talk of sticks and with my propensity to snore the only way I will ever try meditation is alone at home. But not with a Sudoku puzzle; that would guaranteed to put me to sleep.
Oh, I wouldn’t worry about going to a Zen Center if you wanted to; they don’t hit newcomers with sticks, honest. They don’t even bring it out for fear of scaring people off. And it’s actually kind of a feat to be able to fall asleep during zazen; the posture is rather erect, which requires some effort. I was always sort of amazed at people who could nod off and not fall off their cushions or anything.
JP, thanks for my laugh of the day, and the advice. Perhaps I will try it someday. If it is invigorating, I might just stick with it.
The conspiracies continue. Mike Adams says today hewill form part of the investigative team looking into the sudden death of Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez.
Mikey doesn’t SAY he was killed, but he says he was killed, if you know what I mean. Another alternative doctor drops dead mysteriously can’t be a coincidence. Mikey will get to the bottom of all these murders!
[…] but who, according to antivaccine advocates and “autism biomed” quacks, must have been assassinated by a big pharma black ops team. Or something. After all, as we know, the FDA had raided his clinic the day before, and it looked […]
I’m glad to see this story covered on Respectful Insolence and I hope that it gets additional coverage from a skeptical point of view. Practically all of what I’ve seen on it so far is from the “alternative media”/alt-health/conspiracy theory world, which is all abuzz about the “mysterious” string of “holistic” doctor/practitioner deaths and disappearances.
One nutcase who is really trying to take advantage of the stories, and is striving desperately to make himself part of the drama, is the cancer quack and not-doctor Leonard Coldwell, who insists on Facebook that he too is on some sort of “hit list” for telling the “truth.” He is whining that he may very well be the next to be killed or “disappeared.” He is also still claiming that certain critics, including yours truly, are backed by some multi-billion dollar foundation bent on defaming and destroying him. Not surprisingly, his minions are clustering around him with supportive comments and prayers of protection. Frankly I think I’m under far more of a threat from some of those idiots than Coldwell is from Big Pharma.
I do think that it’s very tragic about Bradstreet. Quack or not, perhaps he really believed in what he was doing. I don’t know. It’s sad that he apparently killed himself, but people sometimes do this in response to continual and unrelenting pressure from government and/or law enforcement. Some people simply crack under that pressure. It isn’t a stretch to imagine that Bradstreet died by his own hand, but as others have noted, the die-hard conspiracy theorists will never accept that as a possibility, no matter what kind of evidence ultimately comes from the investigation. “The facts don’t matter if the story is good.”
It seems rather strange to me that the author of this blog seems to think that when a doctor who was persecuted by the government ends up dead with a bullet in the chest in a river, that obviously sounds like suicide. This article attempts to assert that the fact that Dr Bradstreet had persecutors is evidence of suicide rather than foul play. Let’s also not forget about the slew of other doctors who were all mysteriously suicided.
Adam Bly and whoever wrote this blog: Can you get over your bias on the science and look at this as you would any other criminal case? When any person is found dead from a gunshot wound to the chest in a river, there should be an in depth criminal investigation to determine who the murderer is. The fact that the vic was being persecuted by the government and there is an apparent motive for the murder makes it even less believable that it was suicide.
At the end of the day, you didn’t see him kill himself, did you? Are there any witnesses reporting that he killed himself? I don’t see how this is cased closed. It is an apparent murder, and until someone can provide very convincing evidence that the man actually killed himself, then there should be an investigation into the matter. Would you ask for any less from your family? You said you had a family member who committed suicide. Was he or she found dead in a river with a gunshot wound to the chest? If he or she had been, would you quickly conclude that it was suicide? Why a river, why a gunshot to the chest? None of that is consistent with suicide.
Here is the lie in your article: “…Jeff Bradstreet, whose body was found in a river on June 19, dead from a gunshot wound to the chest that appeared to have been self-inflicted.”
How does dead in the river with a hole in your chest EVER appear to be “self-inflicted.” Is it common for suicide vics to dump their bodies in a river? Is it common for suicide vics to shoot themselves in the chest? Regardless of whether you believe the science one way or the other, there is obvious evidence of foul play. The fact that you are ignoring that and pretending it doesn’t exist leads me to believe that you have some sort of agenda here based on a personal bias rather than any valid interest in determining the truth.
Furthermore, I don’t see what problem you have with any researcher or physician promoting a treatment which is non-harmful to the patient. Whether you believe in the efficacy of the treatment or not is beside the point. Dr. Bradstreet was not doing anything dangerous or harmful to anybody else. He was simply testing and administering a treatment you don’t personally believe is effective. However, his patients seem to think it is effective, and I value their opinion much more than yours because they actually tried the treatment unlike you. It seems strange that a bunch of critics would jump out of the woodwork to attack a treatment that:
1. Has no known negative side effects.
2. They have not personally had any experience with or done any kind of research or trials with whatsoever.
Questions:
1. Suppose it doesn’t work. Why do you even care enough to bother writing articles smearing its efficacy?
2. What compelling reason do you have to believe that it doesn’t work?
3. Have you read any of the many scientific studies that DON’T support your position and haven’t been corrected or discredited?
4. If so, why didn’t you mention any of those in your article?
5. Isn’t that a fallacy of suppressed evidence AKA cherry picking?
6. How do you even have a dog in this fight? – Let’s assume for a second that the treatment is utterly ineffective; how, do you gain or lose in any conceivable fashion from the treatment being kept illegal, or from very small numbers of doctors attempting it legally or otherwise?
7. What was your true motivation for writing this article?
8. Do you think that every story which involves official abuse of power or powerful organizations using illicit means to protect their profits or posture for increases in power or position is some whackjob conspiracy theory?
Regarding number 8, if you jump to the conclusion that stuff like that never happens you must be ignorant of human nature. Indeed, history is rife with examples of how people in power are willing to commit secretive heinous acts to keep or expand such power. To reject an anthropic theory simply because it has an element of secretive collaboration is an obvious and provable fallacy.
I don’t know what actually happened to Dr. Bradstreet, or whether GcMAF actually helps treat autism or cancer, but I not biased about it either, which is more than I can say for whoever wrote this article. According to mainstream science, nobody knows what causes autism. That being the case, unless you actually investigated GcMAF yourself and came to your own conclusions about it, how can you make a claim that you are totally certain that it is ineffective and still call yourself a scientist? Science is about investigation not a bunch of nonsense arguments and the slandering of everyone you disagree with. I feel like this article is more political posturing than science. Correct me if I am wrong here.
[…] put aside exactly what GcMAF is (you can read about it here and here) and discuss the type of person who would promote one miracle cure and then suddenly jump to the […]
[…] murdering alternative medical doctors, starting with autism quack Jeff Bradstreet, who committed suicide the day after the FDA raided his office. Of course, it didn’t take long for various […]
Persecutors? Is that what you call people investigating sound claims that Bradstreet was engaged in illegal activities?
Gee, I dunno. Maybe he shot himself and fell into the river?
Opportunity Cost. If people are spending time, money and effort on something that doesn’t work, they have less to expend on things that have been proven to work.
Did you even READ the post?! A clinical trial was performed and the results were disappointing. That’s mentioned in what Orac wrote.
Please post links to these studies.
See remark on Opportunity Cost above.
Bravo! One of the finest examples of an accusation disguised as a question I’ve ever seen.
A trial was done. It failed dismally. Learn to freaking read.
Irony and hypocrisy meters once again obliterated.
You ARE wrong.
Adam Bly and whoever wrote this blog:
OH noes we are revealed, we are all Adam Bly.
One testimony, provided by Orac, states:
But I guess a child crying in pain is not a negative side-effect.
@ hdb
Aren’t we Bonnie Offit, too?
1. Has no known negative side effects.
I happen to regard “Being poor after giving all one’s money to scammers” as a negative side-effect.
@HDB: Can’t I be Nellie Bly instead of Adam? I think her clothing is awesome.
OK; so I’m not up to date on GcMAF:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25056820
Why do I get the feeling that someone is sitting on a large supply of GcMAF in the hope that, somehow, it might be effective for the treatment of anything, and even if it isn’t, would be unethical enough to unload it with a back-story that political forces have sought to suppress it because it works? Of course, I could be having another deja-woo.
Getting off-topic, but does anyone here remember interleukin-2/LAK (lymphokine-activated killer cell) therapy? I remember the high hopes placed in the therapy before it was shown to be far too toxic to be practical for use. In the 1980s, I spoke with clinician in the US who had found significant tumor regressions in a few patients, and also deaths. Some were able to tolerate the experimental treatment better than others. Those with poor toleration were placed under emergency room care due to the extreme chest pains and high fevers caused by the treatment. In the early 1990s, after amply demonstrating that the would-be immunotherapy for cancer was dangerous, it was finally abandoned.
Not common, but it does occur. Vincent Van Gogh, for instance.
I think some time ago a book was published in which was stated Vincent van Gogh was killed by some youngsters. The book was highly critisised, I think.
I take it that Benjamin Kost is elaborating on the same script that was earlier and clumsily propounded by “Kelly” in the Gonzalez comments.
Oh, and…
This is basically identical to some cut-and-paste MMS apologetics that I’ve seen recently at LB/RB. And Kerri Rivera has recently switched to GcMAF quackery. Just sayin’.
… Kerri Rivera has recently switched to GcMAF quackery …
Indeed:
http://ascienceenthusiast.com/miracle-cures-come-go-quacks-forever/#
OK; so I’m not up to date on GcMAF:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25056820
The RetractionWatch site was keeping track of Yamamoto’s series of retracted papers for a while. The evidence that he had made up his IRB and his co-authors and his subjects was causing people to wonder if they could believe his results.
Since Kerri Rivera met Marco Ruggiero (through AutismOne?) she realised that the GcMAF scam has the potential to be far more lucrative than the bleach scam. I notice that although Jim Humble is still a contributor to the 2nd edition of her “Healing Autism”, the blurb puts more emphasis on GcMAF.
@TBruce #162: A friend of mine (an artist of some repute who wouldn’t want her name mentioned) is something of a scholar on the subject of Van Gogh. In her opinion, he killed himself out of shame.
@herr doktor bimler #167: Wholly quackamole!
why a gunshot to the chest? None of that is consistent with suicide.
Benjamin Kost appears to be under the impression that gunshot wounds to the chest are never fatal. Or perhaps that it is impossible to aim a firearm at one’s own chest.
Vincent Van Gogh, for instance.
Hey, let’s go with the classics — Captain Cathcart (that bounder!) from “Clouds of Witness”.
HDB @ 170: Hey, let’s go with the classics — Captain Cathcart (that bounder!) from “Clouds of Witness”. I LOVE you! (Yes, I can place that immediately…)
Keep yucking it up. The cat is out of the bag, 10 of these holistic doctors ending up dead or missing in just over 2 months is beyond coincidence. When the money runs out to take care of all the vaccine damaged kids, you viscously arrogant academics will be running for your lives. Pol Pot 2.0
@Lex #172:
That would be a black bag:
http://blackbag.gawker.com/the-bizarre-anti-vaxxer-holistic-doctor-murder-conspira-1721321305
That would be a black bag:
A little black bag FROM THE FUTURE.
10 of these holistic doctors ending up dead or missing in just over 2 months is beyond coincidence
That would make a great Reality-TV series. Big Pharma hit-teams hunting down Alt-Med scammers… I would watch the hell out of that.
I want a re-make of “The 10th Victim” and I WANT IT NOW.
I’m trying to envision a viscous academic m’self.
(Damn you, Dawn — any man who cites Sayers is mine!)
That viscosity will be a real problem when we’re trying to run.
I feel like that could be a pretty accurate descriptor of myself at the moment.
It is obligatory that I again mention The Man Who Folded Himself at this juncture.
For more recent and publicized suicides by gunshot to the chest, look up the Junior Seau and Dave Duerson (both former professional football players).
Duerson left a note explaining why he had chosen that method, namely so doctors could study his brain; Seau left no note, but it’s widely assumed that his reasoning was the same.
Hi!
Bradstreet has published papers on stem cells with two Italians, Dr. Nicola Antonucci (a Doctor Dan! living in Bari) and a researcher Dario Siniscalco. Antonucci sends his young autistic patients at a clinic in Kiev (EmCell) where Bradstreet himself went in 2011, and were he also sends his own little patients.
Guess with whom these 2 Italians work ? With Luc Montagnier, and Lorène Amet (a Dan! practionioner) etc.
The lectures of the Italians at the last conference of AutismOne en mai 2015 in Chicago can be upload there … Inside there are documents of Doctor’s Data, Geier’s studies, the laboratory of Robert Nataf, a reference to Montagnier. Of course, Antonucci offers also GcMAF etc.
In Italy there are people aware of the dubious activities of Antonucci http://www.lastampa.it/2014/04/29/italia/cronache/staminali-per-i-bambini-autistici-la-rotta-della-disperazione-barikiev-DBajaNway0cmW0TjulXyZJ/pagina.html Stem Cells for Autistic chidren. The road of despair from Bari-iev
[…] about vaccines. Heck, you just know that these same nefarious forces are even going so far as to kill vaccine “skeptic” heroes like Jeff Bradstreet (and, of course, make it look like a suicide) and holistic “pioneers” like Nicholas […]
[…] of course, many people refused to believe it was suicide, and instead blamed “government hit squads” and the like for his death. And so message boards lit up, crowdfunding accounts were […]
There’s some sort of post-mortem family interview on the web, anyone catch it? Reportedly done by someone with the right kind of bias, healthnut or some such thing. Didn’t know if they actually came to accept the reality of suicide or not.
Stem-cells? How odd. Like Bradstreet, Antonucci is deeply invested in the GcMAF scam, and proclaims a high success rate from administering it to autistic kids. How many higly-successful autism treatments can one person sell?
Also add the names of Marco Ruggiero (HIV denialist and GcMAF impresario); also Alessandro Cirillo and Dario Siniscalco, with whom Bradstreet and Antonucci co-authored an advertisement for GcMAF:
http://www.jneuroinflammation.com/content/11/1/78
When they are not co-authoring, they are acting as objective no-conflict-of-interest peer reviewers for one another’s papers:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00240/full
Other people have provided back-up copies:
http://hivforum.info/forum/usrimgs/dora/Ruggiero/Ruggiero,%20May%2021%202015.pdf
I’m amazed at you people.
Naturally, the more viscous you are, the harder it is for authorities to grab you (the handcuffs slide right off).
Makes for reeeeallly slow-motion chases though.
[…] latest conspiracy is that “they” are killing anti-vaccine-friendly quacks. By “they” I mean “the government,” “Big Pharma,” or whatever […]
And the meme continues…
http://www.naturalnews.com/050972_GcMAF_cancer_cells_Bradstreet.html
[…] vor Bradstreets Tod hatten die FDA und die Georgia Drugs and Narcotics Agency sein Büro durchsucht. Der “autism quack and antivaccinationist” stand unter dem Verdacht, die umstrittene […]
Come on. Isn’t it obvious as can be to everyone what is going on? The title of this article alone is enough. They decide this guy is a quack after the FDA raided him, then the next day he was found floating in a river with 2 guns shots from a rifle in his chest? In the article they say he was going to jail for 20 years but he hadn’t even been to court? He was only under investigation but they write an article stating he is guilty and that he killed himself? I think it’s called suicided. This guy who wrote the article has no compassion whatsoever and says crap like he knows how the family must feel because a friend of a friend died in a similar way? Is anyone actually buying this? Then look at all the clowns on this comment section who are writing 100 comments about this one article. They seem to have decided he is guilty and are on here to ridicule anyone who questions the story or supports this doctor in any way. They are way over the top and obviously spending numerous hours patrolling this one article. I think they are refered to as Trolls. If you look, these same guys are always defending the FDA, CDC etc. These guys are not sitting at home without work, they are working for the criminals who killed this man and are paid to discredit anyone questioning the “official narrative”. Why waste time arguing with these people? 750,000 Americans die every year from medications that were properly prescribed by doctors and approved by the FDA. And we are to believe they don’t have their own agenda and are really protecting us? They are protecting their profits and GcMAF is a threat to their profits. They couldn’t care less about any of us. They don’t care if this doctor is harming people because if they cared, they wouldn’t be harming so many people themselves. You don’t have to look very far to see the truth in all this. These paid contrarians in the comments are easy to spot as well.
If GcMAF is not helping people, why have thousands of people been treated with it. Why are companies like the one in Japan doing so well that they can open up 5 hospitals, treating people with GcMAF? And why did 180 different doctors from dozens of different countries publish research papers on GcMAF? Why have they been able to publish articles in prominent medical journals like the Anticancer Research journal, an independent, international peer-reviewed journal. Or the Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology, a famous world renown journal founded in 1901? You won’t find those articles in American journals because the medical industry owns all thos journals and makes sure they have no competition. Discrediting this guy and killing him won’t make GcMAF go away. They are doing great things with this protein that is produced by the human body and has been proven to have no side effects. The FDA and the medical industry would ignore GcMAF and this doctor if it was ineffective. When they are this interested is when it is a threat to them. I think everyone is beginning to see the medical as well as all big industries for what they are. We will take away all their power when we just stop playing their game and take back our own power.