If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last couple of decades, it’s that there is one characteristic of a quack treatment that is almost immutable, that always, always comes to apply to it—and usually rather quickly after it is introduced as a “miracle cure” for something. Basically, sooner or later, that quack treatment will be—shall we say?—repurposed for other conditions, usually many other conditions (e.g., cancer). A corollary to this principle is that, sooner or later, the quack treatment will likely be applied to autism, especially if it’s ever been claimed as a “treatment” for “vaccine injury.” A further corollary (a sub-corollary, if you will) is that, if this treatment, whatever it is, causes significant side effects in the autistic children being subjected to it, instead of stopping the treatment the parents will “persevere” and continue to abuse their child with it. I was reminded of this and thought it worth discussing when I came across a story on VICE by David Gilbert, Inside the Private Group Where Parents Give Ivermectin to Kids With Autism. It gave me serious flashbacks to Miracle Mineral Solution (a.k.a. MMS), and it was that similarity that I wanted to explore.
First of all, times change, but the basics do not. For example, the private group promoting ivermectin is on Telegram, which is where all the COVID-19 quacks, cranks, and antivaxxers go now. Back in the day (namely, less than a year before the pandemic arrived), these sorts of groups dedicated to subjecting autistic children to quackery, all in the name of “recovering” them, were largely on Facebook. The reason is simple. Facebook, as poor a job as it has done in general in removing harmful content, is actually trying to remove harmful content, something that it has sporadic success with. Telegram, however, has close to zero guardrails; basically anyone can create groups about anything they want. Starting out as a messaging service dedicated to privacy and featuring end-to-end encryption, Telegram has evolved into a social media service as well, given the huge number of Telegram channels. It’s not that Telegram has no content moderation, but its content moderation is so lax as to be, in practice, homeopathic, except that as its content moderation is diluted to zero it most definitely does not become more powerful. As a result, it’s not difficult to find many Telegram channels dedicated to COVID-19 misinformation, antivaccine conspiracy theories, and, of course, “miracle cures” like ivermectin.
Another thing that does not change is the way that these groups are often only discovered and reported in the media when a mole lurks in them. The mole could be a reporter, activist, or interested citizen, but the end result is the same. The more horrifying aspects of what parents are doing to autistic children in the name of “curing” or “recovering” them are featured.
Ivermectin to treat autism: The MMS of the COVID-19 era
Regular readers (and those who might not be regular readers but have paid attention to quackery used to “treat” autism) the VICE story about parents treating their autistic children with ivermectin will immediately bring to mind pre-pandemic stories about “autism biomed” quackery, starting with the blurb:
“I have been applying Ivermectin liquid to my granddaughter’s feet, belly button, and swabbing her ears for six weeks now. She complains of sporadic blurry vision and sometimes headaches.”
Moreover, the grift is the grift, as I like to say, and the purpose of these groups is not truly to provide help and advice, regardless of how misguided that help and advice might be, but to promote the quack treatment under discussion:
In a private group on Telegram, parents whose children are living with a range of disabilities including autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, and Down Syndrome cheer each other on and provide support when discussing daily struggles.
But the channel’s main function isn’t actually support: It’s to promote the use of veterinary ivermectin as a treatment—and in some cases a cure—for these disabilities.
As I’ve written many times before, despite its ability to inhibit the replication of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, in cell culture, well-designed randomized clinical trials have failed to find any efficacy for the drug. There’s a reason why I’ve referred to ivermectin as the the acupuncture of COVID-19 treatments because of its extreme implausibility based on basic science alone. The reason for that implausibility is that the concentration required to inhibit viral growth in vitro is 50- to 100-fold higher than what can be safely achieved in humans, meaning that, from strictly a pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics standpoint, ivermectin was always a highly implausible treatment for COVID-19. Let’s just say that the RCT results showing that it does not work were not a surprise to anyone who had actually read the original paper about its antiviral activity in cell culture.
Of course, what was being promoted on this group was not the human formulation of ivermectin, but the veterinary formulation, which is much more concentrated and a much higher dose:
The Telegram channel was established in July 2022 as an offshoot of the much larger pro-ivermectin group “Dirt Road Discussions,” which was set up in October 2021 by Danny Lemoi, who took veterinary ivermectin for almost a decade to, he said, treat Lyme disease. When ivermectin became hugely popular among anti-vaxxers as a treatment for COVID-19, Lemoi leveraged his experience with the drug.
More on Danny Lemoi later, as I’m sure that a number of our readers know that he died recently and that his death sounds as though it might have been due to ivermectin toxicity.
First, however, a bit of comparison. Equine ivermectin comes packaged in syringes with “1.87% ivermectin paste. 6.08 g syringe treats up to 1,250 lbs. Safe for horses of all ages, pregnant mares, breeding stallions.” Another formulation comes as a 1% solution to be given 1 ml/110 lbs of weight. Basically, in horses the dose of ivermectin can be up to 1.200 mg, while the human dose recommended is only around 3 mg. When ivermectin promoters state that ivermectin is “very safe” in humans, they are correct, but only at the dose recommended for humans. As with many drugs, toxicity increases with increasing dose, and when you take far more than the recommended dose your risk of serious side effects increases.
Not that any of this stopped the parents using ivermectin from giving them the horse paste:
The Learning to Fly channel, however, takes usage for children even further.
“It is for mom and dads with kids on the spectrum,” the founder of the channel wrote in a message describing the group last year. “My daughter is 30 yrs old with Asperger’s syndrome and my son is 28 yrs old with autism. We are all 3 on ivermectin and started mid February.”
Moreover, as is often the case with quackery, if your child suffers deterioration after starting the treatment, it is an indication that the treatment is working:
The channel also provides advice on how to explain the ivermectin usage to children:
“Best way to explain it is [the kids] have a cluster of parasites that are in a part of the brain that causes outbursts. When the parasites in that part of the brain get attacked [by ivermectin] the parasites panic and release their toxins as well as get active. Their death dance,” the channel guidelines state. “This will affect the kiddos and their behaviors.”
And when children experience side effects, the channel admins claim that it’s all because the ivermectin is driving out parasites. They call this “herxing,” which is a real term used to describe an adverse response that occurs in people who take antibiotics as a treatment for Lyme disease and a number of other illnesses.
“Herxing can be a big issue with our kids,” the channel admins wrote in a pinned message. “They have so much overloading them already, herxing adds more. Remember things will get worse before they get better. They will have days [when] it looks like their behaviors are getting worse but it is only temporary. This is the herxing.”
The term “herxing,” it should be noted, comes from Lyme disease quackery, because of course it does. Lyme disease is caused by a spirochete, a class of bacteria, and “herxing is short for the Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction, which has been observed in people when they start antibiotics to treat diseases caused by spirochetes, having first been observed in patients with syphilis well over a century ago:
Jarisch Herxheimer reaction (JHR) was first described in the literature by Adolf Jarisch (Austrian dermatologist) in the late 1800s when he noticed an exacerbation of skin lesions in a syphilis patient after starting treatment with a mercurial compound. In the early 1900s, a similar phenomenon was reported by Karl Herxheimer (German dermatologist).
JHR is a transient clinical phenomenon that occurs in patients infected by spirochetes who undergo antibiotic treatment. More specifically, the reaction occurs within 24 hours of antibiotic therapy for spirochetal infections, including syphilis, leptospirosis, Lyme disease, and relapsing fever. It usually manifests as fever, chills, rigors, nausea and vomiting, headache, tachycardia, hypotension, hyperventilation, flushing, myalgia, and exacerbation of skin lesions.[1][2] JHR is an acute, self-limiting condition and it is important to identify JHR and to distinguish it from allergic reactions and sepsis, which can be life-threatening.[3][4]
“Herxing” has, it appears, evolved into an almost all-purpose term used by quacks to describe when someone gets worse after a treatment that supposedly targets bacteria or any “parasite” as a way of explaining that you “have to get worse before you get better.” Steve Novella once wrote about the term while correctly noting that if the person using a treatment for “chronic Lyme disease” gets worse, “then that is evidence that the treatment is working and they are experiencing the JHR (or “herxing” as the community calls it),” while if nothing happens, then “they just need more treatment,” concluding that “no matter what happens or doesn’t happen, it’s chronic Lyme.” Substitute “parasites” for chronic Lyme disease here, and you get the idea. If your child starts getting worse, then it means that the treatment is “working” and eliminating the “parasites” that are supposedly the cause of the condition or disease being treated.
Chronic Lyme disease quacks even distinguish between “good herx” and “bad herx,” for instance, as Dr. Richard Horowitz has claimed:
Dr. Horowitz describes the difference between a “good” herx and a “bad” herx. Basically, with a good herx, the patient will have a reduction of symptoms and begin to feel better after the flare. With a bad herx, the patient will return to their prior baseline after the flare with no reduction in symptoms overall.
Unsurprisingly, there are treatments for “herxing” too that include “alkalinization”; “detox”; supplements, and more. It always amuses me to think of this whenever quacks accuse physicians of treating the side effects of pharmaceutical drugs with more pharmaceutical drugs. Apparently it’s good when quacks do the same thing, albeit with more woo, but bad when physicians do it?
Be that as it may, let’s see more of what parents are reporting in this group:
In the channel, parents even share stories about their children experiencing horrific side effects from the drug, including brain fog, severe headaches, nausea, muscle pain, and seizures—and are routinely dismissed by those running the channel, who claim it’s a normal part of the ‘healing’ process.
Actually, those of us who have followed such quackery know that “dismissed” is probably not quite the right word. Rather, they are “reassured” that such symptoms are to be expected and then encouraged to continue, for example:
A review of the chat’s eight-month history reveals parents complaining that their children suffer from a wide variety of side effects after taking the ivermectin paste, including: vomiting, change in complexion, seizures, lethargy, hyperactivity, agitation, and headaches.
“Major brain fog today after splitting headache yesterday,” one user wrote last month. Another wrote: “I have been applying Ivermectin liquid to my granddaughter’s feet, belly button, and swabbing her ears for six weeks now. She complains of sporadic blurry vision and sometimes headaches.”
“Bleeding or mucous or vomiting or diarrhea or acne or pealing or aches/pains or hot flashes & sweating are all good signs of clearing out your body,” another member wrote. “This is healing, keep going.”
Lest you judge these parents, you should recall how easy it is to fall into an echo chamber and, once in that echo chamber, how hard it is to listen to external voices. It’s even worse, given that the entire ethos of such communities tends to be along the lines of never, ever “giving up,” with abandoning treatment being viewed as surrender and the overall culture being geared towards trying increasingly radical quackery if the less radical quackery doesn’t work. Recall the story of Jim Laidler, who with his wife was drawn deeper and deeper into “autism biomed” quackery due to the much more primitive online venues that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, such as Internet forums and Usenet; that is, until a “Eureka!” moment rubbed Laidler’s face in the fact that all the quackery was not working to “recover” his autistic child, leading him to become an activist against autism and antivax quackery. He and his wife were both doctors, and they got sucked in by communities that weren’t nearly as large and were before the power of algorithmic social media, like FB, served to radicalize.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane to discuss MMS.
Autism “biomed” and MMS
I recall a 2015 article on the antivaccine website that has long promoted autism quackery, The Thinking Moms’ Revolution, entitled Why I Try “So Many” Protocols in Treating My Son with Autism that I encountered long ago:
I refuse to look back in a decade and say “I really wish I had tried that when I first heard about it” or “I really wish I had pushed through that wall of herxing and gotten to the other side.” That is why we have tried so many protocols (and we’ve given them all true trial unless they caused our son to regress) and why I continue to go to conferences to hear new ideas and try new things. This is why I read medical literature over my lunch hour and why I bring new treatment ideas to my naturopath.
This is the entire philosophy and culture behind such groups, be they closed Facebook groups or, more recently, Telegram channel: Never question. Always keep searching. And, above all, never accept your autistic child for who he is. Also, remember that the autistic child is not your “real” child. Something stole your real child from you. Whether it was vaccines, parasites, “toxins,” something else, or—usually—a combination of at least a couple of these things, it was something external that robbed you of your “true” child. Don’t get me wrong, either. This is an entirely understandable human reaction to having your child change or be different from what you had expected or hoped for. It’s basically the changeling myth. (Echoes of this myth are undeniable in “gender critical” reactions to gender-affirming care for trans adolescents.)
I also note that “parasites” have long been an alternative medicine catch-all cause for almost everything, including cancer. Those who’ve been paying attention a really long time might recall Hulda Clark’s “Zapper,” an electrical device that supposedly killed a parasite (a liver fluke) that she had deemed the “cause of all cancers.” Ultimately, she claimed that it could also zap all viruses and therefore cure AIDS and then, eventually, the cure for all diseases, regardless of whether they were caused by “parasites,” infectious agents, or not. Quacks are nothing if not frequently grandiose.
Now let’s go a bit further back in time, to ten years ago, when I first encountered what I consider to be the most relevant parallel to this ivermectin group, the promotion of MMS as a cure-all, in particular for autism.
MMS: How “never give up” leads to horrifying anecdotes
Back in 2013, I encountered the blog of the mother of a boy named Jojo. His mother had been using a variety of “autism biomed” protocols for eight years before I encountered her blog, but had recently discovered MMS. First, a word about MMS. When you break down the chemistry, it is chlorine chlorite, which is a form of bleach. MMS promoters will do their damnedest to deny that MMS is, in fact, a bleaching chemical by pointing to how it is used, for example, as a water purification agent, but it is a form of bleach. Basically, MMS is a 28% solution of sodium chlorite, which when diluted in water—or, better yet, in a weak acid like lemon juice or vinegar—produces chlorine dioxide, the relevant bleaching agent. MMS, or so it is claimed, will kill the intestinal parasites that quacks blame for autism (and a variety of other conditions and diseases). They’ll even claim that you can see the parasites coming out in the stool! MMS for autism was, as far as I can ascertain, first popularized by a woman named Kerri Rivera, who was a regular fixture a decade ago as a speaker at Autism One, the premiere yearly autism and antivax quackery pseudo-medical conference, and recommended giving children MMS both orally and by enema. (Yes, by enema.)
Interestingly, MMS got its start as a miracle cure, thanks to a man named Jim Humble, who promoted it as part of his made-up religion, the Genesis II Church, using it as a profit center to support his “ministry.” The religious fervor behind MMS was unmistakable in the closed Facebook groups dedicated to it, and I sense a similar fervor, albeit not explicitly religous, in this Telegram group dedicated to ivermectin to treat autism.
But back to Jojo’s mother, who began to follow Kerri Rivera’s MMS protocol:
Jojo is given 1 oz of the mixture hourly, so effectively he is getting 1/8th of a drop each time. His first dose was given after school at 1 pm. He is now given 8 doses only although my reading tells me that it is a minimum. I suppose I could increase up to 9-12 doses a day but I’m kinda leery of the possible increase in die-off effects too.
Even as early as day 1, she noted Jojo running a low grade fever and coughing, which, of course, could simply have been a coincidence. Similarly, she also noted JoJo to have increased hyperactivity, which could very easily have been due to confirmation bias. By day 2, Jojo continued to have fever, and his cough got worse. Somehow, his mother came to believe that “coughing after taking MMS could be due to parasites in the lung dying,” as incredible as it might be that anyone would believe something like that. Later entries describe Jojo developing constipation, and, when that resolved, his mother thinking that parasites were coming out in his stool. It is a theme that continues through the rest of the blog, as Jojo develops diarrhea, languidness, and flareups of his chronic eczema (blamed on parasites, of course).
After a week, this mother escalated to MMS enemas, leading to a series of posts with some rather gross pictures. Now take a look at one such link and the picture contained therein. What’s shown are basically stringy bits of something that looks a little bit like a worm. Jojo’s mom asked her fellow denizens of the MMS Facebook group, all of whom were “pretty sure” it was a worm. It was not. Any surgeon or doctor who deals with GI problems will recognize it as a bit of mucus, possibly with a bit of colon mucosa (the lining of the colon). We see this sort of thing all the time, and it was definitely not a worm. Unfortunately, five years later (and the last time I wrote about this issue specifically) parents were still subjecting autistic children to MMS enemas to “cure” their autism, based on the claims that autism is caused by pathogens that include parasites, candida, bacteria, and viruses; “heavy metals”; and food allergies. The claim? According to Rivera, “MMS kills pathogens and neutralizes heavy metals, as well as reduces inflammation.” It took until 2019 before a “mole” exposed the MMS private FB groups in the same way David Gilbert exposed the ivermectin Telegram channel last week.
Ivermectin: MMS redux?
I don’t know if this is truly an immutable law, but it seems that way to me: Among quacks, the use of given quackery for any given condition will ultimately be expanded to be used for more conditions:
Members of the Learning to Fly channel believe that almost everything can be cured by taking ivermectin.
“Some say Down’s syndrome and such can’t be healed, I don’t believe it,” the channel founder wrote in a post earlier this year. Her daughter is also an active member of the group, and when another member asked about the efficacy of ivermectin, the daughter wrote that “everything from inherited multiple generation blood sugar disorders or autoimmune conditions to Cohen and Autism have been cured or made notable progress so far.”
Other parents have asked about a variety of diseases. “My youngest is 5 and was diagnosed with alopecia in January. It started right around Christmas time. Does anyone have any knowledge of ivermectin being beneficial for that?,” a user wrote last week.
In response, the channel founder wrote: “I haven’t heard anyone in here with it but I did find it on the list of things cured.”
See what I mean? This is very much like the way denizens of the private FB groups promoting MMS used to—shall we say?—expand the indications for MMS. Any condition that anyone asked about would be treatable by MMS, because of course it would be! A combinatino of the culture of the discussion group and the people actively promoting MMS, either for religion or profit (or both) made such an outcome inevitable.
Also very similar is the way that side effects are portrayed as evidence that it (be it ivermectin, MMS, or whatever quackery) is working, with doubters being urged to “press on through“:
“My daughter started having blurry vision on the ivermectin,” a member of the larger Dirt Road Discussions channel wrote. “She started with severe headaches alternating with stomach pain. Now her vision is very blurry. Any advice? She’s in the first grade. I don’t want her to miss out on all the learning that is so crucial at this age.”
In response, another parent wrote: “Press on through…It’s working.”
Even if:
In the end, sometimes even the believers are the victims. Remember Danny Lemoi, who had been promoting ivermectin for COVID-19, cancer (for which he had also started recommending some seriously old school quackery like Laetrile), and autism? He died unexpectedly—or, dare I say?—died suddenly (sorry, couldn’t resist):
Just before 7 am on March 3, Danny Lemoi posted an update in his hugely popular pro-ivermectin Telegram group, Dirt Road Discussions: “HAPPY FRIDAY ALL YOU POISONOUS HORSE PASTE EATING SURVIVORS !!!”
Hours later, Lemoi was dead.
For the last decade, Lemoi had taken a daily dose of veterinary ivermectin, a dewormer designed to be used on large animals like horses and cows. In 2021, as ivermectin became a popular alternative COVID-19 treatment among anti-vaxxers, he launched what became one of the largest Telegram channels dedicated to promoting the use of it, including instructions on how to administer ivermectin to children.
While it is impossible to be sure of his cause of death, given the dearth of information surrounding it, it’s difficult not to wonder if the massive doses of ivermectin that he’d been taking for many months before had anything to do with it:
And according to the Missouri Poison Center, ingesting large doses of ivermectin formulated for animals has a long list of side effects, including seizures, coma, lung issues, and heart problems. Veterinary ivermectin is not a cure or effective treatment for COVID, the FDA has repeatedly warned, and is highly concentrated because it is designed for large animals like horses and cows. “Such high doses can be highly toxic in humans,” the FDA cautions.
Again, the human dose of ivermectin is indeed very safe—for humans. The horse dose? Not so much. Again, the dose makes the poison. Also, it appears that Lemoi had suffered from a bout of something close to congestive heart failure, attributed to Lyme disease, which administrators of the channel noted, “Danny was fully convinced that his heart had regenerated after his incident with Lyme disease that almost ended in congestive heart failure.” They also claimed that “a family history of heart disease and chronic stress” were why his heart had ultimately become engorged and that all “of his other organs were unremarkable, with his death being “a death by unfortunate natural causes.” None of this is possible to verify, because neither the administrators of the ivermectin Telegram group nor the family would respond to the reporter’s request for further comment.
Meanwhile, back in the group:
But a review of Lemoi’s Telegram channels shows that many of his followers who are taking his dosage recommendations, or “protocols,” for veterinary ivermectin are experiencing numerous known side effects of taking the drug.
“I’m 4 months now and all hell’s breaking loose, all pain has hit my waist down with sciatic, shin splints, restless leg syndrome, tight sore calves & it feels like some pain in the bones,” a member wrote on Friday.
Lemoi explained away the negative side effects of taking veterinary ivermectin by describing them as “herxing,” a real term to describe an adverse response that occurs in people who take antibiotics as a treatment for Lyme disease.
And:
“I am very new to this… I’ve been on Bimectin paste for 20 days,” one new member wrote on Friday morning, explaining that he too was suffering from Lyme disease. “I have severe chest pain. Costochondritis symptoms. Air hunger, internal tremors, brain fog, headaches on the back of my head, anxiety, depression, doom and gloominess.”
But don’t even just suggest that it might have been the ivermectin that killed Lemoi:
When some members of the group blamed Lemoi’s death on ivermectin, they were criticized in the Telegram channel; their fellow group members claimed they were spreading misinformation.
“No one can convince me that he died because of ivermectin,” one member wrote this week. “He ultimately died because of our failed western medicine which only cares about profits and not the cure.”
Same as it ever was. The drugs and quack treatments might change, as might the specific online forums where such quack treatments are promoted, but the psychology remains the same. Until we have better strategies and tools to address that, simply debunking treatments like MMS, the Zapper, and ivermectin for autism, although helpful to an extent, will not be enough.
57 replies on “Ivermectin goes from being the new hydroxychloroquine to being the new MMS”
I laughed out loud (and groaned) while reading, but there is nothing amusing about the child abuse aspect of this. It’s disgusting. Lest anyone think this is just a fringe thing, my hairdresser last week recommended I put a mixture of olive oil, egg yolk, and GARLIC on my hair as a conditioner because, “natural is always best”. I am to counter the smell this will create with vinegar. If I get through a day without some mention of some kind of woo or anti-“western” medicine diatribe, I’ll let you all know.
It might work as a salad dressing although I’d be wary of the raw egg.
They can pasteurize eggs in the shell now! Recommended for an authentic Caesar salad.
What gets me about this story is the application of the quack cure to the low support needs side of the spectrum, formerly and often still colloquially known as “Asperger syndrome” and historically written off by the biomed community as “not real autism” so as to justify their ignoring the call by self-advocates on the spectrum and autism-accepting parents to support your kid humanely and without quackery (except maybe FC, but that’s a whole other can of organic non-GMO worms).
Deja vous?
Mike Adams tells his followers that he isn’t advising them to take ivermectin BUT he takes some himself every day and shows you how he measures his dose ( 15 mg) with a pipette. A few days ago – although I can’t find it today- he told followers how to make their own MMS which he also uses.
Isn’t it interesting that miracle “cures” that woo-meisters prescribe are all simple chemicals, supplements, food components that are available in places like feed stores, pharmacies ( as a non RX) and grocery stores? One of the loons I survey advocates for mega doses of vitamin C ( 5000 to 100 000 mg a day**) and diverse arcane phytonutrients to solve serious medical problems. Specific substances for specific problems- B vitamins for mental illness, green tea EGCG for immunity and stress, resveratrol for heart problems. OBVIOUSLY they are not poisonous pharmaceuticals which need prescriptions ( which they can’t write).
** 5000 is for garden variety minor issues/ daily life and the large doses by IV is for a cancer patient he treats at his home which I wrote about whose meds were making her “worse”. ( Utrice Leid video prn.live)
I always thought that Mike Adams was a fan of natural living. Yet here he is, ‘advising’ dosing yourself with random supplements every day. I do think that rubbing the human race out and allowing the lizard people to take over is a sensible suggestion. Maybe they deserve it more.
Maybe this will get through the nonce alert….
Had a lady come in to establish care a few weeks ago show up last week with her daughter (A middle schooler.) it was “absolutely critical” that her daughter’s Ritalin Rx be refilled “That day.” I had never seen this poor kid before and they had just moved from a state where I can’t check dispensing records.
Daughter was calm, quiet, normal heart rate. Mom is tweaking in the corner, fidgety, agitated, heart rate 106 sitting still. I ask daughter if she takes her meds regularly and mom interrupts “Of course she does, why are you asking that!!!” Suffice it to say, that script was not refilled.
It never ceases to amaze me what some people will put their kids through to fill some need in themselves.
Did you think the mother was taking the drugs herself, or that she felt this overwhelming, anxiety-provoking need to medicate her daughter?
Oh! She was using them
Did she get some sort of high from ADHD meds? She sounds like a junky looking for a fix. Or someone with unmanaged anxiety.
ADHD meds will typically act like speed to those that don’t have ADHD. For those with ADHD it has an opposite effect.
ADDENDUM:
The Utrice Leid video ( 4 week protocol) has been taken off prn.live and YouTube but remains on Rumble.
I wonder why….
“I did my research, went to the conferences, read the literature, blah blah blah, blah blah blah…treatment ideas to my naturopath.” Reminds me of an old joke:
A gentleman is walking through the foggy, nighttime streets of London when he comes across a man on his hands and knees under a lamppost. The gentleman asks what’s wrong, and the man explains he’s lost his glasses. The gentleman offers to help. They spend five, then ten, then fifteen minutes looking, and the gentleman becomes frustrated. “Sir, we’ve been looking for a long time – are you certain you lost your glasses here”? The man says “no, I lost them over there.” The gentleman, exasperated, says “then why are you looking here”? The man says “because the light’s better.”
It might sound as a joke, but I’ve experienced something simular in real life.
When I walked home in the dark, I lost one of my lenses, so I went on my knees, to look for it. Some guy asked me what I was looking for and when I answered, he suggested I should look near the lamppost, because there was more light there.
Next time I will try to loose my lens near the lamppost.
@ Renate:
Have you met RI’s latest scoffer, Lucas, who is Dutch?
I’m sure you could probably clear up his misguided ideas but probably wouldn’t want to deal with him in any language.
I think I once responded on something he wrote. But I think we don’t think the same. We may share a language, but that is all we share. I’m reminded on another Dutch guy I met on some music-forum. Though we had a simular taste in music, our ideas on most other subjects were opposites of eachother.
“But I think we don’t think the same”
Do you believe that telling a story is the same as depicting universal truth? Are you fond of portentous yet vague prophetic statements with messianic religious overtones?
I think not. Congratulations, your ‘I’m not Lucas’ badge is in the post.
@ NumberWang,
Looking forward to my badge.
Lucas reminds me of the Dutch saying: “Zo de waard is, vertrouwd hij z’n gasten”, which means: “one judges other people’s character by one’s own”.
I doubt that. lucas is arc welded to his lies and intentional misrepresentations. Look at how strongly he triples down on the “fact” that the Nazis were a left-wing movement and thinking otherwise means you’ve been tainted by “liberal educational indoctrination”.
Please note renate, that my comment about not being able to sway lucas is in no way an assertion against your abilities and knowledge. If it seemed that way I apologize.
re Telegram
I notice that much of the woo/ anti-vax I survey is available on Telegram: in fact , Mike Adams ( NN) lists all the places his broadcasts reside- Brighteon ( his own project), Telegram, Parler**, Gab, Gettr, Truth Social ( Trump’s), Substack, Rumble, Bitchute, MeWe and others, including Twitter which has new “management”. The video I listed was taken off You Tube but is available on Rumble. I call these new avenues of misinformation the not-so-dark web because it’s not monitored like FaceBook et al but it’s also not very hard to find.
Chief woo-meister Null even comments that his “classroom on the air” ***series is available on You Tube because he only discusses ‘non-controversial topics” that are “supported by research”.
** do you pronounce that in English or French?
*** yeah, that’s right, he has a “classroom”
OT:
Batten down the hatches, folks. Audrey Hale, the Nashville school shooter, has been identified as 1) recently declaring as transgender (adopting the first name Aiden and male pronouns on social media) and 2) being “on the spectrum”.
Tucker Carlson has already gone full bore on blaming the trans and floating a conspiracy theory that the ‘woke’ mainstream media are covering up this angle. Expect demonization of autistics, and blame for vaccines, to follow elsewhere.
Note that Hale attacked an elementary school, and Adam Lanza, the shooter at Sandy Hook elementary, was also on the spectrum. One can only speculate on what led him to his act, but his online postings reveal a horribly tortured soul, and lack of proper accommodation for his condition — he seems to have been especially plagued by noise and light sensitivities — may have played a significant role in his despair.
But wait, aren’t AFAB’s supposed to be innocent potential victims of sexual assault via sharing bathrooms with “inherently violent by hormonal/chromosomal nature” AMAB’s? Maybe when they’re on the spectrum, though, that goes out the window and they are “insane and/or confused.”
Inconsistent narratives all the way down. All narratives have some level of inconsistency, says the psych research, but sometimes they get quite blatant and it’s a shame that more people don’t care.
Yeah. I heard. Twitter is an even bigger cesspool than usual because of it.
Agreed. Twitter actually got worse although I didn’t think it was possible.
Elon is a loon who enjoys others’ loony ideas. Chaos is encouraged.**
re shootings
Young representatives like Mr Frost grew up with active gun drills.
More importantly than being trans, the shooter had serious emotional/ psychological issues. They reached out to a student they vaguely knew perhaps 15 years before, having no one else. Whilst the figure squirrelelite gives shows 0.4 % for trans people as shooters nearly reflecting their representation generally, the more curious figure to me is that few women are shooters although they are more than half of the population overall.
I’m sure some people will go ahead cavalierly and conflate*** being trans with psychological issues and/ or violence which is not the case. Alt med prevaricators of course will blame violence on the meds supposedly all shooters took ” since Columbine”. Even if this were true it doesn’t mean that meds caused the violence: it may mean that these people had serious issues that weren’t being sufficiently addressed by meds and therapy and that no one around them saw or reported red flags.
** someone commented that the right’s misinformation campaign isn’t purely about indoctrination but seeding chaos so that no news source is trusted : when everyone is a reporter how is consensus possible?
Of course, it IS really but when half of the public doesn’t accept it? See alt med/ anti-vax on Dr Fauci, a ‘career criminal’
*** hopefully NOT leading to more violence against trans people who have had enough abuse/ violence directed at them.
Never underestimate how low people, even in the same family, can go. One of my sisters-in-law has been with her partner for 30+ years. They got married as soon as it was legal. All of the other siblings in my wife’s family were thrilled and are very happy for them.
Children of three of them, so 3 sets of the nephews and nieces, view it as “an abomination” and make no attempt to hide discussions of how disgusting they find it, even when said sister in law and her wife are within hearing distance.
The general tendency for people is that they suck. Decent people are [IMO] rare.
My best guess is that both Adam Lanza and Aiden Hale were undiagnosed schizophrenics and were mistakenly considered autistic.
The 27th was an off day for mass shootings in the U.S/ There were only 2 that day compared with 4 the day before and 4 more the day before that. Wish it were sarc, but just saying.
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting
We’re up to 38 so far this month.
A few minor rays of hope.
A mother jumped in front of Fox’s live camera at the scene went viral on live TV for a couple minutes complaining about Congressmen who don’t want to protect children.
Representative Maxwell Frost who had introduced a bill last week to establish a Federal Office on gun violence had the perfect lead to chew out his colleagued who had passed a Parental Rights in (blocking their children from receiving a proper) Education Bill instead.
One YouTube commenter pointed out that the police in Nashville while not perfect in their response technique, jumped right in and neutralized the shooter in only 13 minutes from when the 911 call was placed. That’s about as good as we can hope for in a response and much better than Uvalde.
But it shows the real solution has to be prevention.
He also pointed out that in the last 2 1/2 years there have been 4 mass shootings that involved a trans individual. So with a bit more than one day, guessing 1000 total, that works out to 0.4% of shootings involving trans shooters, which is pretty close to the prevalence among adults in the U.S.
So anyone science-based could easily see that being trans is not really a risk factor for being a mass shooter.
https://youtu.be/V-h3eM3QTQk
As if people blaming transpeople for this and other kinds of things will ever take the word of science.
I know! But we’ll probably see some state pass a law that purports to help prevent this one case out of the 130+ so far this year from happening in the future. But no action on the other 129 or what they all have in common, which is guns.
Guns don’t kill people. People do. So why allow people access to guns?
@Rich,
It’s the hardline pro-gun interpretation of the Second Amendment which divorces the right to keep and bear arms from the concept of a “well regulated militia”. And it is becoming dogma in the Republican Party which is deeply supported by the gun lobby.
I saw a phone video Lauren Boebert recorded in 2018 when she was driving cross state to “observe” a pro gun control rally where she expressed the opinion that she was OK with a couple thousand kids getting shot every year if she could keep her guns. And legislators are openly saying they can’t do anything about the problem (?!?!?)
There was a shooting in Memphis yesterday with only(?!?!) 2 killed and 5 injured.
By the Boebert standard that’s a good day. /s
Just as an aside, here’s a good video illustration of the effect these gun actually have.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-damage-to-human-body/
I wonder if it would make sense to publish pictures of GSW on ammunition boxes, in the same way that cigarette packs have pictures of the consequences of smoking.
If a society thinks that common access to guns is worth the inevitable consequences then they should see those consequences.
However, the way that article will be taken depends strongly on your attitudes. For some it shows how horrific the damage to people who are victims of mass shootings. For others that article is just telling people that the robber/rapist/murderer who has just broken into your house is best countered with an AR15 than a 9mm.
Max Frost was quite the acid rocker back in the day.
https://m.facebook.com/watch/
That is correct, the western medicine he wasn’t even taking is what killed him. This stuff is far more powerful than homeopathy.
I know it gets easy to laugh at the stupidity, but the sad and frightening thing is that there really are people so deep in the conspiracy theory that they think like this.
The mechanisms of action of ivermectin against SARS-CoV-2 is proven & clear, despite what the junk epidemiological studies concluded.
I could design a study that would fail to prove that gravity is correlated with a falling object if I wanted to.
I wonder if “Ivermectin as a treatment for autism” theory started when kids with autism were being treated with Ivermectin for Covid & caregivers noted a distinct reduction in behaviors.
If so, it probably wasn’t the Ivermectin. It was the phenomena of the Fever Effect in Autism.
https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/new-evidence-hints-at-mechanisms-for-fever-effect-in-autism/
Then again, TLR-4 activation has been shown to be associated with increased pro-inflammatory cytokines as well as autistic symptoms & Ivermectin can inhibit TLR-4 activation so I don’t know??
The irony of “herxing” being scoffed at by the same people who tell you that if you get sick after a vaccine; that means “it’s working”; is noted.
Maybe if “science” would stop pushing schizophrenia medications for adults as the only “help” available for autistic children, parents wouldn’t be so desperate?
Maybe if “science” would stop looking for zebras while the horses are kicking them in the face; we could have some neuroimmunomodulation therapeutics that could actually help with the most debilitating symptoms that autistic people endure?
Indeed, which is exactly why we always knew that the concentration of ivermectin required for inhibition of SARS-CoV2 in cell culture is 50- to 100-fold higher than what can safely be achieved in the human bloodstream, making it incredibly unlikely, based on pharmacodynamic considerations alone, that ivermectin would be effective clinically in humans against COVID-19. Completely unsurprisingly, RCTs confirmed that ivermectin is ineffective against COVID-19, either to treat it or prevent it.
https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2022/04/11/sbm-versus-ivermectin-and-other-implausible-treatments/
https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2022/03/28/these-days-ivermectin-reminds-me-of-acupuncture/
I always enjoy it when Orac himself steps in to correct someone: I imagine that that is only when the level of mis-information presented exceeds a strict criterion he has already established. Fortunately, it is only occasionally that such event occurs and we are treated to a burst of unrivalled lucidity. Thank you, Orac.
Scoffers forget what one of his daily occupations involves.
Not if you were honest. Describe such an experiment.
Indeed. I, too, works like to see the design of the suggested study. coschristi, time to put up or shut up!
Remember who you’re dealing with.
Christine is a fantast of the first water.
So you think constant inflammation is the cure ? It is actually symptom of a diasease
Actual Herxheimer reaction happens when syphilis is cured wih antiobiotics. It is a mild and short reaction. Sae applies to reactions showing hat vaccie is working.SAEEs are another thing.
You of course could read ivermectin RCTs and tell us problems. No epidemiological studies were involved
Just a note. When I open this website’s home page (only this website!) on my apple tablet, and click on a link to any article such as this one, another window pops up with clear spam content.
Are you sure that you have not been hacked in some way? Maybe through some wordpress plugins?
Highly unlikely. The site is regularly scanned for malware, both by the hosting company and with installed plugins.
All you pro-vaxers and supporters of other pandemic control measure better watch out. Former Trump Administration “science advisor” Paul Alexander is salivating over the prospect of the death penalty being imposed on people whose views he doesn’t like. Posted on Substack 3/30:
“Nuremberg Code used for Nuremberg 1.0 arising out of the horrific experiments and brutality of the Germans; note 7/8 doctors swung from ropes then! Nuremberg 2.0 is needed now with legal inquiries”
“They swung from the gallows and we must be brave and initiate proper legal tribunals, proper judges, no kangaroo, proper and if judges call for death penalty, then we follow the judges, doctors & all!”
Invoking Nuremberg is nothing new, but such screeds are typically less bloodthirsty.
I’m not sure where that 8 comes from. There were 23 doctors indicted on up to 4 charges each at the Nuremberg “Doctor’s trials” (formally United States of America v. Karl Brandt, et al). Seven were acquitted of all their charges, seven were condemned to death by hanging (so at least that number is correct), and the remaining 9 were sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from 10 years to life. All of the imprisonment sentences were later commuted, and none of those sentenced to imprisonment served more than 8 years.
As far as I can tell, there were no medical doctors tried in the main International Military Tribunal trial, where Bormann, Göring, Dönitz, Hess & others were tried.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_Trial
I know its been said so many times, but in the end what drives this the most is the grift. The ones pushing this crap know their rubes very well and have zero scruples about parting as many fools from their money as possible.
I suspect most of them don’t really believe the guff any more than Carlson believes the crap he peddles to essentially the same audience.
What I can never quite get over is how easily the rubes are fooled, its almost willful.
Because contrarians attribute excess mortality 2020-2022 to Covid vaccines, I’ll leave this here for them:
via Dorit Reiss @doritmi :
from Jason Williams @jason_willz1
excess mortality was due to:
post-Covid sequelae, delays in emergency care, delays in routine care, mortality displacement, undiagnosed Covid,
mental health issues
NOT VACCINES.
RFK jr is not an actuary..
Fwiw, I’ve been having the same problem as Igor this week: going to RI homepage with Firefox on iphone opens a porn page in front, though the RI post also opens behind. And this is confined to RI, all other sites I’e visited with the phone are OK. Didn’t happen today (Fri, 3/31) though.
It could be a Firefox on iPhone issue. I’m using Firefox on a Zorin laptop, and I’m not getting redirected.
firefox on an Imac — no issue.
I’ve never seen this, and I routinely open the page in a number of browsers, albeit it’s been a while since I tried iOS Firefox. So I tried it again. Nothing untoward happened. Unfortunately, if this is an issue it’s not as though I can afford to hire an HTML/Wordpress expert to figure it out.
I’ve had similar a few times (Amazon Fire tablet and browser). I don’t get a redirect but I get a second tab opening. Not a big drama.
That sounds almost like a classic ‘advertiser being shady’ issue. Which would suggest, of course, it wasn’t Respectful Insolence itself that got hacked, but instead one of the other dozen or more sites that Javascript gets drawn from.
[…] for COVID-19 has, predictably, expanded to its being touted for cancer and even autism. The FLCCC will, of course, claim that they have never promoted ivermectin for such purposes, but […]