Authors: Dr Paul Offit
Somers doesn't see it that way. “It is the year 2041,” she wrote. “This is me, Suzanne Somers, at ninety-four years old. I am healthy, my bones are strong; my brain is working better than ever. I wake up happy, excited, and active. Most mornings start with wonderful sex with my one-hundred-and-five-year-old husband, Alan, who has also embraced the same health regimen. I am not one of those âold people' put into a corner or, worse, in a nursing home. Nope, not me, I got it early on. I wanted to live, really live. So I jumped on the fast-moving train of the new medicine and never looked back. My friends laughed at me, called me a ânut case' and a âhealth freak,' but who's got the last laugh now?”
No one can deny Somers her optimism. No one can deny her an interest in living a better, fuller, more productive life.
But Suzanne Somers isn't just a citizen railing against the dying of the light. She's a paid promoter of a $6-billion-a-year anti-aging industry who hawks products that have no chance of helping and, because they include megavitamins, every chance of hurtingâa huckster who wants you to ignore the science. “It is not always easy, certainly from a nonscientist's perspective, to distinguish between real anti-aging science and the vast array of products, from unproven and untested supplements to self-help books by those who believe that age is just a number and a state of mind,” writes Jacoby. “The last thing marketers want is for the public to make a clear-sighted, evidence-based assessment of whether such potions do anything more than enable denial of the physiological reality and inevitability of aging.”
S
uzanne Somers isn't the only celebrity to have created a cottage industry of alternative therapies. There is another television and movie star who believed she had found a cure for something the medical establishment had ignored. This time, however, the target audience wasn't adults with menopause or advancing age; it was parents desperate to find a cure for their children.
When you think about it, what other choice is there but to hope?
âLance Armstrong
J
enny McCarthy's film credits include
The Stupids
,
BASEketball
,
John Tucker Must Die
, and
Dirty Love
, which she also wrote. More recently, McCarthy has made guest appearances on
My Name Is Earl
,
Chuck
,
Just Shoot Me!
and
Two and a Half Men
. Her latest book, published in 2012, was
Bad Habits: Confessions of a Recovering Catholic
.
On September 24, 2008, Oprah interviewed McCarthy about her book
Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism Against All Odds
. McCarthy's son, Evan, had been diagnosed with autism. Like Somers, McCarthy didn't trust mainstream doctors. They didn't know what caused autism or how to cure it. McCarthy, on the other hand, knew both. And she was
there to tell mothers that it was time to take control. Time to be their own doctor. Oprah agreed. “During a production meeting not long ago,” said Oprah, “one of my producers brought in an unforgettable article from the
Boston Globe
Magazine
about the most extraordinary woman I've ever heard of. Right then and there we knew that she was somebody that we had to share with you on our show. Call your friends right now, because this woman, she's not just a momâshe's a warrior.” Where doctors failed, Jenny McCarthy and Oprah Winfrey would succeed. And another counterfeit industry was born.
I
n 1973, Bernard Rimland, a researcher at the Institute for Child Behavior Research, in San Diego, and the father of an autistic son, wrote a chapter titled “High Dosage Levels of Certain Vitamins in the Treatment of Children with Severe Mental Disorders.” (The book was edited by Linus Pauling.) Rimland believed that large doses of vitamins and minerals could treat autism. He later founded the Autism Research Institute, which spawned Defeat Autism Now (DAN)âa group of clinicians dedicated to the notion that autism could be cured with vitamins and supplements. Where Somers aligned herself with gynecologist Christiane Northrup to promote bioidentical hormones, McCarthy aligned herself with Jerry Kartzinel, a DAN doctor, to promote treatments for autism.
In 2010, McCarthy and Kartzinel published a best-selling book titled
Healing and Preventing Autism: A Complete Guide
. Although McCarthy didn't start the movement to treat autism with biomedical therapies, she did, with the help of Oprah
Winfrey, bring it into the homes of tens of millions of Americans. McCarthy, Kartzinel, and doctors affiliated with DAN believed that autism had many causes and many cures. DAN doctors have variously argued that:
Oprah was impressed. Impressed that Jenny had written a book that contained so much good advice. Impressed that Jenny had become an expert in the treatment of autism. “She wrote the book,” said Oprah. “She knows what she's talking about.”
The vitamins, minerals, supplements, coffee enemas, and herbs recommended by McCarthy to treat autism are the same therapies that were recommended by Michael Schachter to treat Joey Hofbauer's Hodgkin's disease, William Kelley to treat Steve McQueen's mesothelioma, and Suzanne Somers to counter menopause and aging. Vastly different problems, eerily similar treatments.
A
lthough McCarthy doesn't mention it in her books or television appearances, researchers have shed a great deal of light on the cause or causes of autism. For example, Ami Klin, at the Yale Child Study Center, studied babies who were only a few weeks old. He wanted to see how they attended to their mother's face, finding that those who were developmentally normal looked into their mother's eyes, while those later diagnosed with autism watched their mother's mouth. Eric Courchesne, at the University of California at San Diego, found structural abnormalities in the brains of children later diagnosed with autism when they were still in the womb. And Hakon Hakonarson, of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, along with many other investigators, found certain genetic abnormalities in autistic children. Researchers have also found that environmental factors can influence the risk of autism in the developing fetusâspecifically, drugs like valproic acid (an anti-seizure medicine). Of interest, susceptibility to
environmental influences appears to occur
before
children are born, not after.
Given our current understanding of the disorder, McCarthy's advice to treat autism as if it's caused by parasitic infections, heavy-metal poisoning, or blocked lymph glands is nonsense. So it shouldn't be surprising that whenever her therapies have been tested, they haven't worked. Worse: McCarthy's advice to avoid vaccines is not only useless; it's dangerous. Parents who choose not to vaccinate aren't lessening their children's risk of autism; they're only increasing their risk of suffering preventable diseases.
S
ometimes it's hard to have much sympathy for the buyer. Adults who spend hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars on the endless array of vanity items found in the cabinets of anti-aging gurusâall with the hope of turning back the clockâare going in with their eyes open. But when alternative healers take advantage of desperate parents, it's a different story. Parents of children with autism will do anything to help their children. Perhaps no story shows just how desperate parents can be than one involving an obscure intestinal hormone called secretin.
In the late 1990s, secretin became all the rage when a woman named Victoria Beck said that it had caused a dramatic improvement in her autistic son's language acquisition. Others also claimed remarkable results. So autism researchers decided to test it. They divided children into two groups; one received intravenous secretin, the other intravenous salt water. None of the parents knew which preparation their children had
received. The results were interesting. Most parents in the secretin group rated their children as improving. But so did parents whose children had received salt water. In other words, parents had such a strong desire to see results following an expensive intravenous medicine that they believed their children were improving, regardless of what they'd received. It's hard to know why this was true. Maybe parents perceived children as better even though they weren't. Or maybe parents had become more attentive, causing them to appreciate subtle differences they hadn't seen before. Whatever the reason, salt water doesn't treat autism, so something other than the pharmacological effect of secretin had been at work. Fifteen studies have now shown that secretin is no better than a placebo for autism.
The most amazing part of the secretin story was what happened next. When parents were told that responses to secretin and salt water were indistinguishable, 69 percent still wanted to use the drugâstill wanted to pay thousands of dollars and travel hundreds of miles to get something they now knew didn't work. That's how desperate they were. Because mainstream medicine didn't have anything better to offerâdidn't have medicines that could make autism melt awayâparents mortgaged houses and cashed in retirement accounts to find anyone who could promise hope, even if it was false hope. And even when they knew it was false.
A
lison Singer, founder of the Autism Science Foundation and a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Business School, explains how easily well-educated parents can be duped. “When my daughter, Jodie, was diagnosed with autism,
I wanted to fix her,” she said. “I wanted to do everything possible to make her better. What kind of mother would I be if I didn't try? At that point I didn't realize how lifelong autism would be. We tried gluten- and casein-free diets. We tried dimethylglycine. People said you had to sprinkle it on French toast. So I learned to make French toast.” Singer's moment of clarity came when she saw a doctor who had been recommended by a friend. “One time I took Jodie to a chiropractor,” she said. “He told me he could cure Jodie by rearranging the ions in her brain with a giant electromagnet placed under her mattress at night. And, âoh, by the way,' he sells the magnets for two hundred dollars. So I went home and I talked to my husband about it. At this point, I had stopped being a smart person. And he just looked at me and said, âListen to yourself. Do you hear what you're saying?' It was that moment when I realized how far I'd gone. This was my grief, not my brain. And you can't think with your grief.”