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Autism biomed quackery on Facebook: Exposed by moles

Autism biomed quackery is unfortunately all too commonly inflicted upon autistic children. Fortunately, there are moles seeking to expose it.

One of the most horrifying forms of quackery is one that is sometimes called the “autism biomed” movement. It’s a movement that I’ve been writing about since very early in the history of this blog. Basically, “autism biomed” rests on the belief that autism (and should be) treated for cure; it’s called “biomed” because the quacks promoting these treatments believe that they understand the biology of autism and declare it a “biomedical” condition for which they have the biomedical correction. They are, of course deluded. Much, but by no means anywhere near all, of autism biomed quackery rests on the scientifically discredited idea that vaccines cause autism. More to the point, autism biomed includes treatments like chelation therapy, megadoses of vitamin C, “detoxification,” GCMAF, homeopathy, and nearly every imaginable form of quackery, including, for example, and the use of Lupron to suppress testosterone and in essence chemically castrate autistic children while misdiagnosing them with “precocious puberty.” That last one one, of course, originated with autism quacks Mark and David Geier. Autism biomed franchises quackery and hijacks legitimate research and turns it into quackery. Indeed, there was an organization dedicated to autism biomed quackery that has since morphed into something else. If there’s one thing you must understand about autism biomed, its that its culture is based on the idea that one should try, try, try, and never give up. If one form of quackery doesn’t “work,” the answer is not to give up and turn to science-based medicine or the radical idea that they should perhaps accept their autistic child for who he is, but rather to try ever more radical quackery.

Tbis brings me to one of the most vile, if not the most vile, of the modalities used in autism biomed is Miracle Mineral Supplement (MMS), which is in reality a form of bleach. I’ve described over the years how the cult of MMS, led by the Genesis II Church, its founder Jim Humble, and its secular celebrant Kerri Rivera, the last of whom single-handedly brought bleach enemas to the autism biomed movement. I’ve described how quacks have induced parents to feed bleach to their children and give their children bleach enemas. Where do parents find out about this quackery?

On the Internet, of course.

Back when I started blogging about these things, Facebook was in its infancy, and Twitter didn’t exist. So parents used blogs and formed discussion forums to discuss autism biomed quackery. With the rise of Facebook, this became quite a lot easier. Parents set up private (or even secret) groups and used them to discuss their quackery, free from the prying eyes of skeptics concerned about their activity trying to find out what they were up to. Fortunately, there are women like Melissa Eaton and Amanda Seigler, who have taken the art of being moles in these groups to a new level and who were featured in a story on NBC News yesterday:

When they aren’t working or taking care of their autistic children, Melissa Eaton and Amanda Seigler are moles. Eaton, 39, a single mother from Salisbury, North Carolina, and Seigler, 38, a mom to six in Lake Worth, Florida, have spent much of their free time in the last three years infiltrating more than a dozen private Facebook groups for parents of autistic kids. In some of these groups, members describe using dubious, dangerous methods to try to “heal” their children’s autism — a condition with no medically known cause or cure. The parents in many of these groups, which have ranged from tens to tens of thousands of members, believe that autism is caused by a hodgepodge of phenomena, including viruses, bacteria, fungal infections, parasites, heavy metal poisoning from vaccines, general inflammation, allergies, gluten and even the moon. The so-called treatments are equally confused. Some parents credit turpentine or their children’s own urine as the secret miracle drug for reversing autism. One of the most sought-after chemicals is chlorine dioxide — a compound that the Food and Drug Administration warns amounts to industrial bleach, and doctors say can cause permanent harm. Parents still give it to their children orally, through enemas, and in baths. Proponents of chlorine dioxide profit off these parents’ fears and hopes by selling books about the supposed “cure,” marketing the chemicals and posting how-to videos.

Yes, that’s MMS they’re talking about, the bleach in the bleach enemas I’ve been talking about.

Basically, Eaton and Seigler pretend to be desperate parents looking for treatments or a cure for their child’s autism. Because they actually have autistic children, they are very convincing. After all, the moderators and gatekeepers of these groups are very wary, as they want to guard against just what Eaton and Seigler are doing; they want to prevent skeptics from infiltrating their groups to observe and report on what’s happening and what they’re discussing. Once in, Eaton and Seigler take screenshots of posts by parents describing subjecting their children to quackery like MMS. They are not the first to do something like this; I’ve written about what I’ve learned from previous moles in autism biomed groups before, and it’s not pretty. They do, however, appear to be the most dedicated and systematic moles that I’ve yet encountered.

Here are some of the things they’ve found. Here’s one example of a child subjected to autism biomed quackery:

“My son is constantly making a gasping sound,” posted one Kansas mother who claimed to treat her adult son with chlorine dioxide, according to screenshots shared by Eaton and Seigler. “He won’t open his mouth,” a Canadian mom wrote of her 2-year-old’s unwillingness to drink the chlorine dioxide. “He screams. Spits. Flips over.”

Well, yes. It’s bleach. It not infrequently makes these children sick. After all, Kerri Rivera’s whole protocol involved increasing the dose until the child does start to become sick. That was the point. For example:

The groups are filled with parents who say they have tried treating their children with chlorine dioxide. “Have not been able to get 5 year old to cooperate with enemas,” a Massachusetts mother complained, according to a screenshot provided by Eaton and Seigler, who work together in their investigating. One Georgia mother posted a photo of a long thread of what looks like mucus that she said dislodged after giving her autistic son a chlorine dioxide emema. In the caption, she wrote, “It broke in half when Jojo trying to escape.”

And:

The worst part is the comments, which suggest that the children’s adverse reactions are just proof that the chlorine dioxide is working, Eaton and Seigler said.

Yes, I’ve seen that claim many, many times. It is, as I just mentioned, a central feature of Kerri Rivera’s protocol, where she explicitly says this. Reading between the lines, my interpretation of her advocating gradually increasing the dose was that she misinterpreted the side effects and nausea that MMS can cause as evidence that the MMS was “working.” Sadly, although Rivera can no longer sell her quackery in the US, she’s still active in Mexico. Hilariously (and depressingly), she does still defend her use of MMS:

Rivera declined to be interviewed by NBC News, but in emails she defended chlorine dioxide and her credentials. “This is a medical issue. I have a degree in homeopathy and work with MDs and PhD scientists,” she wrote. Rivera did not respond to requests for more information about these doctors and the institution that granted her degree.

I’m not sure what bleach enemas have to do with homeopathy, but I am amused by her claim that she works with MD and PhD scientists. Of course, I’m not surprised that she didn’t actually name any of these “MD and PhD scientists.”

As for the long thread of mucus mentioned by the parent, I’ve discussed this aspect in detail. The “ropes” and other things that parents fish out of the poop of their children after they’ve received MMS enemas are not parasites or worms or whatever else MMS advocates claim them to be. They’re mucus and large chunks of the lining of the colon, because that’s what happens when you shoot bleach up your rectum. You’ll slough at least parts of the lining of your colon!

Not that that deters Rivera:

In a video, Rivera scoffs at doctors’ warnings: “If it’s deadly, we would see dead people.” In fact, we do. In the last five years, poison control centers have managed 16,521 cases nationwide dealing with chlorine dioxide, according to data provided by the American Association of Poison Control Centers. Approximately 2,500 of those cases involved children under 12; it’s not clear how many of those children were autistic. The data showed serious side effects from chlorine dioxide poisoning in 2,123 cases since 2014. Fifty of those cases were considered life-threatening, and eight people died.

I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of these cases were autistic children treated with MMS. In fairness, though, it’s not just autism biomed. Humble and his church advocate the use of MMS as a cure-all and general health tonic. It’s basically a sacrament to them, which is how they try to get around the law. So it’s possible that a significant fraction were not autistic children being subjected to autism biomed, but I highly doubt that it’s a majority.

If there’s something we need, it’s more people like Eaton and Seigler willing to go above and beyond just observation and find these parents subjecting their children not just to medical neglect, but to medical abuse.

By Orac

Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski.

That this particular surgeon has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 35 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)

DISCLAIMER:: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.

To contact Orac: [email protected]

70 replies on “Autism biomed quackery on Facebook: Exposed by moles”

What the parents who subject their children to oral bleach, or bleach enemas do, I would consider child abuse, or even torture. Every time I read stories like this, I get annoyed and really angry. If these parents love their children, they have a really strange way of showing it. I think these people belong in jail.

Well they always say they love their children, or at at least they did when they were born.

They love their “real” children. Unfortunately, they don’t view their autistic children as their real children and believe that their real children have been stolen away, hence their efforts to “recover” their “real” children.

Is Autism the modern day “changling?”

You know, the old folklore that babies were stolen by fairies and replaced by a look alike who acted completely different. I think torture was used back then as well, to try to get the “real baby” back.

@Angela:

Is Autism the modern day “changling?”

Uta Frith believed so. I find the hypothesis quite compelling. Certainly, the changeling’s appearance and behaviours come across as those of autistic children.

I’m usually very hesitant to support criminal penalties against parents misled into using quackery against their children – I blame the quacks selling the treatment, not the parent – but I would agree that parents that do this, that use industrial strength bleach against their children, should face such consequences.

The descriptions in this article show they see their children suffering. And they have to have seen the point that it’s bleach.

I have to agree with you. They’re describing, themselves, their kids in states that vary from distress to possibly agony. These kids deserve a real life, and they’re not going to get it with parents that refuse to accept and work with their autistic selves.

Adults have an obligation to know what is child abuse and what is not. You can’t be suckered into child abuse and quackery, without having a big chunk of child abuser inside of you.

No consideration required. It is absolutely child abuse, perpetrated by desperately deranged parents and messianic fraudsters. Worse, a blind eye is all too often turned by institutions and society because the problem is Hard and the children involved are “Difficult”.

It may not be quite on the same scale as the worldwide Catholic sex abuse scandal, but it’s made of the same stuff. May it receive its Spotlight moment soon.

@Angela

Not only is autism the modern day changeling, it’s the medieval changeling as well contemporary descriptions make it quite clear that changelings were the developmentally disabled.

This is horrifying. Turpentine!? I commend these women’s efforts to expose this abuse, truly heroic but I do fear for their safety. What good will any of this do if no authorities take action? These child abusers will just set up shop on a new Facebook page and carry on. What in Hades is keeping the FDA from banning MMS? This too is insanity.

” These child abusers will just set up shop on a new Facebook page and carry on.”

Unless if Facebook does something about them.

Hopefully. In the current climate described by Adams, Null and others, maybe action will be taken by tech to shut them down.
Using social media to spread pseudoscience, conspiracies and hate speech should be forbidden.

@ Orad – yes, that is what I should have said. I do not believe they love their autistic children.

No they love their idealized children, the ones they had, before they turned out to be different. So they want their old child back, the child they loved. And to get the child they loved, back, they do all kind of horrible things, to the child that once was the child they loved.

I hate those people, who are unable to accept the child they have and who seem to only be able to think about turning back the wheel of time, though the child has always been the same child, they only hadn’t discovered it was different.

A friend of mine has an autistic child and she gets very very angry at any suggestion her child is less than, or broken, to her he’s who is and thats enough.

I feel a certain empathy towards the parents – I have an autistic son, so I understand the desire to actually do something, I’d give it a go if I believed there was a realistic chance of it helping my son cope with the world. A comparison could be made with parents forcing their children to undergo chemotherapy, except of course that we know that it works whereas MMS is very much the dark side of wishful thinking. Certainly people should be in jail over this, even parents if they keep on at it. But love is a funny thing, especially when desperation is combined with misinformation.

@Carl: “I feel a certain empathy towards the parents”

Absolutely. You’d be a monster not to. They should also be prosecuted as appropriate and the abused children permanently removed to care. Some people are just not made to be parents.

(IANAPsychologist, but I can’t help wondering if severely autistic children could be better off in institutional care, given their very particular interpersonal and environmental needs.)

I find it really odd as well. I might have mentioned on here before that I have two disabled children, not autism, but a rare x-linked condition. We have spent their lives with the mantra of not what they cannot do, but what can they do and put in place strategies to allow them to as much as normal children as possible.

We were part of a parent’s group, athough it was long distance as there were only a couple of other children locally. Most of the parents had similar aspirations to ours, but there was a group who spent their time bemoaning their fate in having children who were so much harder to care for. One of those parents lived near enough to us to drive us out of the parent’s group when I could no longer stand her complaints about being hard done by and the nonsense she would insist we try to cure our children. No matter how many times I explained this was a genetic condition with no cure, only management – it cut no ice with her.

Along the way, courtesy of many and sometimes extended hospital visits, we often ran into families with children with other disabilities. The overwhelming majority were looking for ways to make their children as independent as possible. There were other responses ranging from trying to inhibit their children’s development so the parent would always be needed to intecede for the child (a form of Munchausen’s by proxy) to the afore mentioned “this child has ruined my life”.

Only a few autism parents get sucked into the swirl of autism biomed cures thankfully, but what they put their children through for their own selfish ends is appalling. While the parents share the blame, if there were no shysters getting rich off useless treatments, then perhaps the parents would no be so willing to torture their children. Of all these treatments MMS is up with the most harmful and I for one will be shedding no tears the day that ‘Archbishop’ Jim and his acolyte get their deserved comeuppance.

I would guess that these parents run a gamut from cultish irrationalists through stress-induced psychotics to malignant narcissists. So far down the rabbit hole of distorted thinking and group reinforcement, I doubt the first two even understand what love is any more, while the third never has/will love anyone but themselves.

This makes me physically ill. It’s child abuse. The children should be removed from the home.

“In a video, Rivera scoffs at doctors’ warnings: “If it’s deadly, we would see dead people.”

For some of us, we see dead people as part of our jobs. The thing is that not all of them die due to pointless interventions or neglect/denial.

So by Kerri Rivera’s math eight deaths due to chlorine dioxide in five years indicates that it isn’t harmful. Sounds a bit like the same math Dr Bob and Del Bigtree use to minimize the seriousness of measles. If whatever they advocate isn’t Ebola or Black Death level mortality then its OK. Yikes.

Motivated reasoning is a powerful force. Combatting health science misinformation is becoming as important a public health priority as developing harm minimization programs or new drugs and vaccines…

Snake oil sellers never die, they just change their brand of snake oil.

It’s child abuse, pure and simple. That being said, when I read “I have a degree in homeopathy,” all I could think was:

Time and again, on a number of websites where quackery has been discussed (including this one) I have pleaded for the people to stand up and be heard about the horrendous, evil abuse that has been perpetrated on children by ant-scientific medicine, pro-quackery lunatics.

#metoo caused a stir,but when are we going to see an uprising against the child-abusers?

Today I went investigating on the Facebook page of the Anti-Vax website run by Larry Cook. What do I find? He’s actually promoting MMS! I was horrified! Surprisingly, the last time I checked 2 out of 3 comments were against MMS. The one Pro-MMS claiming it was not deadly. We clearly see here that’s a total lie. The other two comments were from the same person, but she seemed at least somewhat sane, rejecting this proposed treatment. I’ll definitely keep an eye on that.

A few years back, Kerri Rivera was promoting MMS at the Autism One conference. Aluminum quacks and redacted paper experts Tomljenovic and Shaw were featured speakers at this same conference. I let my alma mater UBC know that I was not happy with their faculty members endorsing child abuse by their participation.
Not that I had anything to do with it, but neither Rivera nor T&S are speakers at Autism One any more.

Rivera was basically banned by a consent decree, as I recall, from doing anything in Illinois to promote MMS. She literally can’t speak about MMS in Illinois, and Autism One is always held in suburban Chicago near O’Hare Airport every year. Speaking of which…I haven’t even looked at it this year. Autism One is usually held on Memorial Day weekend.

Autism One 2019 is starting today. See Autism One 2019 website I didn’t go over the site in detail
Many of the luminaries associated with anti-vax and autism quackery will be present including-
Del, Andy, the Geiers, Ruggiero, Shade, Seneff, Lyons Weiler , David Lewis and others too numerous and batshit to mention. Maybe we’ll get a glimpse of Elle McP.
Perhaps Orac has a mole nearby. ( I know of one but he may not be able to afford money thrown on woo BUT he would be great . IF ONLY…)

RFK Jr is also on the list. I won’t waste a weekend (or my lunch) attending Autism One but I’d like to ask him what his opinion of Geiers’ chemical castration is. Also whether he’s speaking to his family members who gave him that righteous smackdown. Also when does he start chairing Trump’s vaccine safety commission.

Ooh, I’m so full of questions.

“Not deadly” is such a low hurdle. I mean, amputation is generally not deadly unless there are other issues, but I suspect most fans of quackery would be uncomrotable if we suggested they try it out on themselves.

Guess who is back? If Orac will allow it, of course. Here is my objective take, as always.

I have to agree that these unproven interventions rank as child abuse. Of course this is right behind unproven, unscientific vaccination intervention.

The thought of smug mothers complaining about their children being non compliant while forcing bleach down their various orifices made me empty my stomach! If they think what they are doing is great for their child, they should test it on themselves first!

For anyone who hasn’t seen them a YouTube channel has some very good videos on both MMS use and Turpentine eating (YouTube has just banned a notorious advocate of turpentine as a cure all). The guy who did the videos is a British chemist, I’ve posted the links below. Be warned the ones on MMS “trials” in Africa is a bit confronting. Oh and he’s a Pom so he drops the F bomb a bit.

This is the one on turpentine- https://youtu.be/-bYDXFzWgNM

These are all on MMS “trials” in Africa.
https://youtu.be/nfjwkTXoSFo
https://youtu.be/fZq-KuowgfM
https://youtu.be/ubm_FT8WeG8

Yeah, here to. What I really love, however, is the use of “muppet” as a term of scorn. The guy who does the videos just drips distain when he uses the term to describe the person who promotes drinking turpentine.

This was a tougher read than usual. That these parents are so self-assured is mind boggling. Would these parents view a mainstream medical treatment of their child that prompted the same level of pain and adverse physical reactions in such a phlegmatic manner?

“Once in, Eaton and Seigler take screenshots of posts by parents describing subjecting their children to quackery like MMS. They are not the first to do something like this; I’ve written about what I’ve learned from previous moles in autism biomed groups before, and it’s not pretty.”

Yeah. Well I, at least, when I feel like sharing horrible stuff, like a snuff movie, do not hide behind private groups. I do it openly.

“If there’s something we need, it’s more people like Eaton and Seigler willing to go above and beyond just observation and find these parents subjecting their children not just to medical neglect, but to medical abuse.”

Yes. It’s medical abuse. I’d even call that “medical child abuse”, which, I agree, is a very loaded term.

Thank you so much Orac! You’re one of the few doctors I know of that acknowledges openly that not only medical neglect happens, but also medical abuse.

I’m on the autism spectrum and i take what I’m reading here very personally. I am not some thing to be tortured in the name of some illusory “cure”. I, and all my autistic brethren and sisters everywhere are all one thing these monstrous autism quacks and their hideous followers have no knowledge of – we are people. We are not objects, or animals, or evil creatures out of some nightmare imagining. We have all the same rights as any neurotypical, cradle to grave.
These mothers and many other parents of auties treat their child like a lump of clay. They park them in front of the TV or the computer all day, and that’s the end of it They go from being children who are lumps of clay to lump of clay adults, hard to handle, unable to tend to themselves, and generally a nuisance to their caretakers.
My nephew is a counter-illustration. My brother and sister-in-law have been determined to give him the most opportunities they could. Instead of an annoying reminder of their perceived imperfection, they took him to riding lessons starting at age five. About twenty years on he is an accomplished equestrian, one of a handful of special needs riders that jump in competition, and sometimes he competes with neurotypicals. He figure skates in local shows. He went through the public schools from 1st grade to high school graduation, albeit with an adult shadow most of the way. He asked for and had a bar mitzvah, and did his portion well. He even went to his senior prom with my daughter. He works a full work week in a sheltered workshop where the special needs workers do real work, silk screening and embroidering (I have been inside.They do almost all the work, and the works areas are kept clean and safe.). They recently did an order embroidering names and logos on over ten thousand uniforms for a major health system in our area,
Yes, he still loves to watch his videos and search out things he likes on the internet, still stims and perseverates, still has communication problems, and always will, but he has had opportunities to show what he can do, and he can do a lot. All his life he has been challenged, socialized, productive, and proud of it all.
I truly despise the promoters and users of these medieval quack tortures and I wish ill on them.

@ORD

As a fellow autist I share your.. discomfort at reading of the abuse committed in the pursuit of “cures” and I wanted to thank you for the heart-warming tale of your nephew.

All kids NT and NAT need/deserve love and support to become great people (or as I like to call it “Parenting”), my own parents did a great job – all without a clue that I was NAT. I was just “difficult” but they persevered, found ways to engage and connect with me and I think I turned out more or less okay.

For the article in general I strongly feel that the whole “biomed” movement and MMS in particular is straight up abuse, no ifs no buts. And my empathy for the parents stops when they start abusing their kid because they are autistic – they can dress it up as “treatments” or “searching for a cure” all they want – it doesn’t change a damn thing. Just like society now largely views the barbaric attempts to “cure” homosexuality as the abusive actions they were I hope that we’ll eventually get there on autism as well and neurodiverse people will be accepted as who they are rather than “normal” people who are somehow broken or defective.

“Just like society now largely views the barbaric attempts to “cure” homosexuality as the abusive actions they were…”, and are, because they’re still being done.
I am bisexual, but I kept my mouth shut about it. Another bullet that I dodged.
Actually, my “enlightened” parents would probably have sent me to yet another Freudian “analyst” (Isn’t the irony delightful in knowing that to spell “analyst” you have to start with “anal”? And “therapist” is obviously divisible into “the rapist”?), who would have at best wasted my time, and at worst filled my head with half-believed bizarre and outré metaphors and similes with no basis in fact other then the analyst’s assertion. Even now, when my mother sees Anderson Cooper, she shakes her head and says “what a waste”.
I have never encountered a Freudian (or a high school guidance counselor) who wouldn’t have better served society by being broken down into their component elements and redistributed. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

It’s sad from the NBC article that it doesn’t sound like the authorities have been able to do much when these undercover parents report. I’ve had one family ask about MMS because someone online was pushing it on them. I told them absolutely no and that it was child abuse plain and simple. I think they believed me. I hope they believed me.

In the last five years, poison control centers have managed 16,521 cases nationwide dealing with chlorine dioxide, according to data provided by the American Association of Poison Control Centers. Approximately 2,500 of those cases involved children under 12

I am simply staggered.

Hopefully (?) most of those cases are the classic “child getting into stuff that should have been locked up better” and not “parent applied to child”.

Then again I don’t know why anyone would have this stuff at home.

Calli Arcale: OK, that seems like a reasonable idea. My family had a hot tub when I was a kid and my parents were intense about keeping the pool treatments locked up, and not letting us near them when they were dosing the hot tub.

Nowadays you can buy bacteria to help treat your pool (according to my boss).

One of the worst things you can do is listen and smile politely when some idiot declares “I know what’s best for MY child.” No, you ignorant murderous dolt, you really, really don’t. That’s why we have experts.

And when an expert says “I know what’s best for my child”, what’s your reaction?

Cognitive dissonance?

It depends on what they are doing. Expertise is no excuse for abuse

Expert in what?
Like, a person can be an expert in paleontology and that expertise will have no relevance to their parenting choices.

Maybe if that person is an expert in early childhood development, or is an L&D nurse, that would be relevant.

Expertise needs to be relevant.

You did note that I specified “some idiot,” right? An expert with relevant knowledge to the field is obviously not some idiot. In fact, they’re the only ones you SHOULD listen to. (And no, being a parent doesn’t make you an expert on childcare.)

@JustaTech: So you see no problem when a medical doctor sees in his children lots of problems in relation to his personal history and his specialty? You’d never find it weird? He’s an expert, right?

F68.10: Well, I think that’s part of why doctors aren’t allowed to treat their own family; partly because when you’re an expert at hammers everything you see is a nail (to abuse an saying) and mostly because no one is expected to be objective about their family members.

So a good doctor shouldn’t be diagnosing their own child, and one who does is possibly not a very good doctor.

Someone on Twitter said it well: a parent is an expert in their child’s history.

@JustaTech: ´Well, I think that’s part of why doctors aren’t allowed to treat their own family’

Well, I’ve seen no legal provision on that topic in my country. Neither legal ones, nor regulatory ones from the medical board. The only article that could be perceived as having been violated in my case was the fact that I have been denied the right to choose my own doctor myself. And of course… how can you positively prove such a fact?

I tried contacting the medical board, and the only answer I’ve got was a very ´soothing’ message, to put it politely.

Is it really illegal in your country for medical doctors to diagnose and treat the it kids themselves? I did look around for an answer on this topic, and it doesn’t seen illegal at all. I even had an american MD who specialises in medical ethics explain to me that there is no ´consensus’ on the topic, and that, as of today, it’s considered OK to do so…

Is it really illegal in your country for medical doctors to diagnose and treat the it kids themselves?

Illegal? Of course not. How would such laws (not a federal question, so 50 or so different ones) even be written? Second cousins are prohibited in Rhode Island? Your retort is prima facie nonsensical.

Treating oneself or immediate family members is <a href=”https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/ama-code-medical-ethics-opinion-physicians-treating-family-members/2012-05>formally discouraged by the American Medical Association. I don’t have the energy to go find more examples. In other news, a lawyer who represents himself is his own worst client.

^ <a href=”https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/ama-code-medical-ethics-opinion-physicians-treating-family-members/2012-05″>Fixed link, I hope.

@Narad: ´Your retort is prima facie nonsensical.´

What is nonsensical? JustaTech claimed that doctors are not allowed to diagnose their own kids. Instead of being rude and tell JustaTech what she ought to be told clearly and explicitely, i.e. « Bullshit! » (which I clearly am entitled to do…), I did make every effort to remain polite, and tried to find evidence that doctors are not allowed, as JustaTech claimed, to diagnose their kids.

The evidence I found is pretty much unsatisfying.

You’re now telling me that it is explicitely « discouraged » in the US. What a marvelous country! It indeed has clearer guidelines than mine!

However, it still is not disallowed, and even if it were, I’m pretty sure there wouldn’t be any mechanism enforcing that this doesn’t happen.

And I’m sorry: I do not see how three decades of medical delirium at the hand of one of my family members could be described as ´nonsensical’. I’d describe it as quite deadly instead.

Unfortunately, we are now living in an era where the major fact-using professions are under siege. This includes, but is not limited to, science, medicine, education, the military officer corps, intelligence, diplomacy, you name it, “they” are against it.
Much on that at https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/ David Brin has much to say on that topic, and most of it worth reading.
Brief summary of the prevailing mindset at


And as to our “stable genius” president, I’ve seen some stables. I’m not sure I’ve seen any geniuses in them, but I sure have seen a lot of horses’ asses.

I make chlorine dioxide for a living. Of course I make it in machines designed to treat municipal water systems. The warnings for exposure to ClO2 are quite low. 0.1 ppm short term exposure and 0.3 ppm permissible exposure limit. Dangerous stuff.

“And when an expert says “I know what’s best for my child”, what’s your reaction?”

It’s a red flag, even when expert qualifications are in a relevant field, i.e. pediatrics.

One can get blinded by personal involvement and ego.

Well, technically this only applies if you know they are wrong. “Hey, you should pump MMS up your child’s bum”, “I’m in Paediatrics and I know what’s best for my child thank you very much”. In general terms, telling an expert that they are wrong in their own area of expertise when you have no expertise yourself is what alt med types do.

In general terms, telling an expert that they are wrong in their own area of expertise

You sure about that? I once told a highly successful physician scientist (psychiatrist with a work schedule of 5am to 11pm 7 days a week) with a large portfolio of research work to be more scientific when doing the differential on me…

Alain

@Dangerous Bacon: “It’s a red flag”

Good answer!

Gee! My opinion of doctors is slowly starting to improve…

Ah well. They are human, with all associated foibles. Worshipping doctors is just as bad as assuming they are all venal baby murderers.

Orac, just incidentally, FiOS News One had a piece on those two women the same day you posted this. I was on the phone when it came on, but the little I could hear sounded positive.

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