Killing Us Softly Page 16

  Next, Bookman holds up an ordinary spool of thread. “This fantastic thread is not available in stores,” he says. “It is smuggled in by Oriental birds specially trained for ocean travel, each carrying a tiny thread in a small satchel underneath their ruby throats. It takes 832 crossings to supply enough thread to go around one spool.” The angel can’t reach for his wallet fast enough. “I’ll take all you have,” he says.

  Bookman continues: “Sewing needles, marvelous plastic shoelaces, genuine static eradicator, suntan oil, eczema powder, razors, athlete’s foot destroyer. How about some simulated cashmere socks?” The angel is sweating, obsessed: “All right, all right. I’ll take it all!”

  The clock strikes midnight—too late for the angel to claim Maggie. The angel realizes he’s been had. “One minute past twelve, Mr. Bookman,” he says. “And you made me miss my appointment.” “Yes,” replies Bookman. “It was quite a pitch—very effective. The best I’ve ever done. A pitch so big, the sky would open up.”

  Serling in voiceover: “Louis J. Bookman. Age: sixtyish. Occupation: pitchman. Formerly a fixture of the summer. Formerly a rather minor component to a hot July. But throughout his life, a man beloved by children. And, therefore, a most important man. Couldn’t happen, you say? Probably not in most places. But it did happen—in the Twilight Zone.”

  When Louis Bookman was at the height of his sales pitch—knowing he had to distract the angel of death if Maggie were to survive—he talked in a rapid-fire, high-pitched, nasal voice, like a duck. In the sixteenth century, the Dutch had a name for this: kwakzalver, meaning one who quacks like a duck while promoting salves and ointments. This became the English word quacksalver, later shortened to quack, meaning anyone who proffers false cures. For some, the term also implies intent—that quacks are knowingly fraudulent in their pursuit of fortune. But this isn’t always the case.

  In many ways, Bookman was a classic quack. He was an impassioned salesman who clearly loved children and wanted to protect them. He was convincing, in large part, because he was convinced. When Bookman claimed that 832 Oriental birds were required to make one spool of thread, he believed—at least for the moment—in what he was saying, even though it was pure fantasy. And his cures for eczema and athlete’s foot were offered well before treatments like topical steroids and antifungal creams were widely available. Bookman’s false promises weren’t unusual. In the 1800s, quacks offered Dill’s Diabetic Mixture before the discovery of insulin; Peebles’ Epilepsy Treatment before anti-seizure drugs; Dr. Shoop’s Diphtheria Remedy before diphtheria antiserum; Detchon’s Rheumatism Cure before anti-inflammatory drugs; Az-Ma-Syde before bronchodilators; William Radam’s Microbe Killer before antibiotics; and Cancerine before chemotherapy.

  Quacks offered potions that made you smarter (Harper’s Brain Food), younger (Blush of Youth), less anxious (Dr. Kline’s Great Nerve Restorer), more successful (Wendell’s Ambition Pills), less freckled (Dr. Berry’s Freckle Ointment), more potent (Las-I-Go for Superb Manhood), and more fertile (Becket’s Sovereign Restorative Drops for Barrenness). Patent medicines had such wonderful, colorful names, you couldn’t help but buy them: medicines like Admirable Essence of Life, Squire’s Grand Elixir, Hamlin’s Wizard Oil, and Kickapoo Indian Sagwa (satirized in the cartoon Li’l Abner as Kickapoo Joy Juice). And it wasn’t only the public that believed these claims; celebrities did, too. Devices like the Radio X pad made Al Jolson a better singer, and “nuxated” iron made Jack Dempsey a better fighter and Ty Cobb a better hitter. At least according to them.

  We look back warmly on these salesmen and their funny medicines—a whimsical, bygone era made obsolete by the relentless advances of science. But there’s no need for nostalgia—hucksters and their wondrous elixirs haven’t gone anywhere. One works in a small town just outside Charlotte, North Carolina. In fact, people travel from all over the world to see him—and to buy the two magical potions he invented.

  Rashid Buttar graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, majoring in biology and theology before attending the College of Osteopathic Medicine and Surgery, in Des Moines, Iowa, where he specialized in emergency medicine. He’s enormously popular, attracting patients from thirty-six states and forty-two countries.

  Buttar has also written a book—The 9 Steps to Keep the Doctor Away—and produced a series of instructional videos such as Heavy Metal Toxicity: The Hidden Killer; Autism: The Misdiagnosis of Our Future Generations; and Cancer: The Untold Truth. Both as a writer and as a speaker, Buttar delivers his message passionately, clearly, and compellingly. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, US News & World Report, and the New York Times and appeared on ABC’s 20/20, PBS’s Frontline, and CBS’s World News Roundup. In May 2004, Buttar testified before a congressional committee investigating new treatments for autism.

  Buttar’s message is simple: environmental toxins such as mercury and lead cause chronic illnesses, which should be treated with chelation medicines. (Chelation, from the Greek chele, meaning “claw,” binds heavy metals and rids them from the body.) Rashid Buttar knows what scares people. From Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring—warning of the dangers of DDT—to concerns about environmental toxins today, it’s easy to appeal to the notion that we’re poisoning ourselves. And the need to keep the body pure is centuries old, reflected in the text of every major religion. In 9 Steps, Buttar writes, “If it’s in the form God created, it’s good. If it’s not, leave it alone. God given = Good. Man-made = Madness.” To rid themselves of unseen toxins, hundreds of thousands of Americans receive chelation drugs every year, usually intravenously.

  Although popular, the fear that man-made poisons are causing chronic illnesses is largely unfounded. Studies haven’t supported the concern that certain environmental contaminants such as dioxin, radon, bisphenol A, hexavalent chromium (the villain in Erin Brockovich), trichloroethylene (the basis of the book and movie A Civil Action), and even DDT cause the diseases claimed. And while chelation therapy is valuable, it’s not a panacea—it’s required only for people exposed to large quantities of heavy metals, such as lead paint in old houses or methylmercury in contaminated fish.

  Rashid Buttar doesn’t see it that way. When patients come to him with cancer, he often chelates them. The same is true if they have arthritis, autism, diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, or hormonal problems. During a licensing hearing in April 2008, Dr. Art McCulloch, an anesthesiologist from Charlotte, asked Buttar’s nurse practitioner, Jane Garcia, whether it seemed odd that every single one of their patients had been poisoned by heavy metals:

  MCCULLOCH: Does it seem unusual to you that 100 percent of the patients that come through your door would have one particular condition?

  GARCIA: Well, when we look at what we are doing in our environment; what we are doing with toxic waste; what we are doing with pollutants—where is that going? It goes in our water supply. It goes in food we eat. And what do we do? We ingest that.

  MCCULLOCH: So it does not seem unusual?

  GARCIA: It doesn’t.

  At the beginning of his career, Rashid Buttar didn’t treat many children. Then something happened. “In January of 1999, my son, Abie, was born,” said Buttar, fighting back tears. “At ten months old, he started to speak. He had a ten-, twelve-word vocabulary.” But at fourteen months of age, Abie regressed and could no longer speak. The first word he’d lost was the first word he’d learned: abu, meaning “father” in Arabic.

  Buttar soon realized that his son had autism and that God was asking him to do something about it. “Looking back, it’s clear that God had a specific plan for me; but I was moving away from the right path,” recalled Buttar. “My name in Arabic means ‘one who stays on the right path of life.’ Now I realize that this experience was nothing more than God upping the ante, sending me a clear message: ‘You are going to do what you were meant to do, what you were created to do!’”

  Buttar had seen his destiny. He would find a cure for autism. �
�I subsequently spent thousands of hours—many if not most of them late at night, sometimes all night—studying, researching, learning, crying, and praying that my son would be returned to me,” wrote Buttar. “I pleaded, begged, and threatened God. I bartered with the Creator, negotiating my arms and legs in exchange for the return of my son.”

  Within a few years Buttar had developed a novel chelation therapy, one that didn’t have to be injected or ingested, as all FDA-approved drugs for the treatment of true heavy-metal poisoning require. Rather, Buttar’s chelation, called TD-DMPS (for transdermal dimercaptopropanesulfonic acid), could simply be rubbed onto the skin. The results, according to Buttar, were phenomenal. “Five months after I began his detoxification,” wrote Buttar, “Abie went from no language to a vocabulary of five hundred–plus words. [Today] he’s extraordinary—ahead of his peers in school in all subjects and two to three grade levels ahead in math and English, an incredible athlete in every sport he tries.”

  By April 2006 Buttar had treated more than 250 autistic children with his wondrous anti-autism cream. To determine whether his medicine was working, he tested children’s urine, finding large quantities of mercury and lead. As toxins poured out, autistic children recovered, some dramatically. To many parents, Rashid Buttar was a hero, his drug a miracle. Unfortunately, Rashid Buttar, his therapies, and his diagnostic tests aren’t quite as advertised. His inconsistencies came to light in a story that swept the nation and went viral on YouTube. It involved an NFL cheerleader with a terrible problem.

  On August 23, 2009, a twenty-five-year-old cheerleading ambassador for the Washington Redskins named Desiree Jennings got a flu shot. Two weeks later, she developed a bizarre series of symptoms. She couldn’t walk without flailing her arms and legs, and her speech was halting and robotic. Although Desiree couldn’t walk, she could run, competing in an eight-kilometer race. She could also walk sideways and backwards. She just couldn’t walk forward. Desiree claimed that if she listened to startling sounds like a telephone ringing or hip-hop or techno music, her symptoms worsened. However, if she listened to the English alternative rock band Coldplay, her symptoms improved. She also developed a British accent, even though she was born and raised in Ohio.

  Desiree was taken to hospitals in Leesburg and Fairfax, Virginia, before ending up at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore. There, she was examined by internists, physical therapists, speech therapists, neurologists, neuropsychologists, and psychiatrists who subjected her to a dizzying array of blood tests, scans, and metabolic screenings. Despite extensive testing, no one could find anything wrong with her. Finally, a physical therapist offhandedly provided Desiree with the name of a disease she could embrace: dystonia, a movement disorder.

  On October 13, 2009, WTTG-5, a Fox network affiliate in Washington, D.C., picked up the story. Three days later, Inside Edition jumped in, opening its segment with “She’s the beautiful cheerleader whose heartbreaking story is shocking the nation!” Footage from Inside Edition made it to YouTube. Soon hundreds of thousands of people had learned that the flu vaccine caused a horrible, disabling disease.

  Anti-vaccine activists rushed to Desiree’s aid. Jenny McCarthy and then-boyfriend Jim Carrey, working with Generation Rescue—a group dedicated to the notion that a mercury-containing preservative in vaccines caused autism—directed Desiree to the popular physician in North Carolina who they knew could cure her. In November 2009, Buttar examined Desiree at his clinic. His diagnosis was predictable: “mercury toxicity” from the flu shot. Buttar began intravenous chelation. “We took the toxins out of her system,” declared Buttar, who confidently predicted that Desiree would fully recover. Within a few hours Desiree was feeling better. Amazing. So amazing that a film crew from ABC’s 20/20 traveled to North Carolina to document what had happened. Unfortunately, with the cameras rolling, Desiree regressed. No longer able to walk, she had to be taken out of Buttar’s clinic in a wheelchair.

  Slowly, Desiree’s story fell apart. First it came to light that neurologists at Johns Hopkins had diagnosed Desiree’s problem as psychological. Later, other physicians weighed in. Yale neurologist Steven Novella wrote, “Jennings’ movements [and] evolving speech patterns do not fit any known pattern of neurological damage. Rather, they are all features of psychogenic symptoms. The one that is probably the easiest for people to understand is her vaguely British accent. … There are only so many ways that speech can be neurologically abnormal—none of them make you sound British.” Neurologists at the University of Maryland School of Medicine now use Desiree’s YouTube video to illustrate what psychological movement disorders look like.

  When the producers of Inside Edition realized they’d been had, they did a follow-up story. On February 5, 2010, they caught up with Desiree outside a shopping mall. “When Jennings first walked out of a store and into the shopping-center parking lot,” said the correspondent, “she seemed to be walking normally. But as she left to get into her car [and saw our camera], she was walking sideways.”

  In the name of helping Desiree Jennings, Rashid Buttar had ignored the real cause of her problem. Desiree needed psychological support, not chelation. “I remain sympathetic to Desiree Jennings,” wrote Novella. “She is an unfortunate woman who is being exploited by the media, dubious [treatments], and the anti-vaccine movement. What she needs is the delicate management of science-based practitioners who know how to deal with such cases.” Later, Desiree said, “If I have to go over to China and do experimental procedures, I’ll find a way to get [my life] back. It may take a while, but I will get everything back. I will find a way.”

  Buttar believes that his chelation medicines work on people like Desiree Jennings because he detects heavy metals in the urine after treatment. Unfortunately, Buttar’s tests and conclusions are misleading, for several reasons.

  First: Because metals like mercury and lead are present in the earth’s crust, everyone has small quantities in their bloodstream. These trace quantities aren’t harmful.

  Second: Because everyone has small quantities of heavy metals in their bloodstream, virtually everyone who is given a chelating agent will excrete heavy metals in their urine.

  Third: Reference ranges for heavy metals present in the urine after chelation don’t exist. So when Buttar claims that patients have too many heavy metals in their body, he’s groping in the dark. Indeed, a look at the fine print of a commonly used testing company states, “Reference ranges are representative of a healthy population under non-challenge or non-provoked conditions.” When Buttar described his miracle chelation treatments to a congressional subcommittee, congressmen nodded approvingly every time he showed mercury in the urine of autistic children. But the congressmen would have seen the same results had Buttar chelated them. Indeed, when researchers compared mercury excretion in children with or without autism, they found that autistic and normal children had the same amount of mercury in their bodies.

  Fourth: Not only do Buttar’s chelation therapies not work, but it doesn’t make sense that they would. When a cell is damaged by a heavy metal such as mercury, it’s permanently damaged. When doctors treat patients with chelation who really are poisoned by mercury, they do it for one reason: to bind free mercury and rid the body of it before it can do more harm. This means that when Rashid Buttar treated Desiree Jennings with intravenous chelation, claiming an almost immediate reversal of symptoms, it couldn’t have been because of the chelation. Following the first reports of Desiree’s remarkable recovery, Steven Novella wrote, “Brain damage does not immediately reverse itself once the cause is removed. … Now Jennings herself, and Dr. Buttar, report that Jennings began to improve while still sitting in the chair and receiving chelation therapy, and within thirty-six hours her symptoms were completely gone. First, let me say that I am very happy Ms. Jennings’ symptoms have resolved. Hopefully now she can go on with her life. But to me, this impossibly rapid recovery is a dramatic confirmation that her symptoms were psychogenic to begin with.”

  In 2009,
when Rashid Buttar was asked whether he had tested his anti-autism cream to prove it worked, he responded, “No, we haven’t done that. Why would I waste my time proving something that I already know works innately?”

  By choosing not to test his miracle cure for autism, Rashid Buttar carries on the grand tradition of medical hucksters throughout the centuries. The claim is always the same: It works because I know it works. It works because my patients say it works. “This little bottle is the only thing that has been shown to conclusively get these kids better,” says Buttar. Think about this for a moment. You’ve just invented the only medicine that you believe cures autism, a disorder that affects as many as one in eighty-eight American children. Wouldn’t you be the first in line to prove that it works? To prove that it should be on the medicine shelf of every child with this disorder? When Edward Jenner thought that an injection of cowpox could prevent smallpox, he couldn’t wait to test it. In 1796, Jenner proved that his vaccine worked; soon, it was used throughout the world. When Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolated insulin in 1921, they rushed to children’s bedsides to prove that it worked; now insulin is standard therapy for people with diabetes, allowing sufferers to live longer. And when Howard Florey and Ernest Chain isolated, purified, and mass-produced penicillin in the early 1940s, they immediately tested it in victims of a Boston nightclub fire. So why is Rashid Buttar hesitant to test a medicine that he “knows” is the only effective treatment for autism? Probably because, once it was studied, he would have to admit that his claims are fanciful.