Killing Us Softly (22 page)

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.”

B
uttar 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.”

I
n 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.

D
esiree Jennings ultimately left Rashid Buttar, put off by the size of his bill. She shouldn't have been so surprised. One
need only look at Buttar's autism treatments to see how he operates. During the first twelve months, children are required to use his chelating cream every other day, at a cost of $150 per small vial. Buttar makes sure that parents use his product only—no substitutes. “Many pharmacies are already trying to duplicate TD-DMPS by creating their own topically applied form of DMPS,” he writes. “These inferiorly combined substitutes are being marketed to capitalize on our research and impersonate TD-DMPS. Proceed at your own risk.”

Although sales of Buttar's anti-autism cream have been robust, they pale in comparison with Buttar's biggest seller: Trans-D Tropin, another potion he invented. As with his autism cure, claims for this transdermal drug are remarkable. And as with his autism cure, these claims have never been put to the test, which is in part why the FDA has never licensed it. “After the first few days to the first two weeks on Trans-D,” writes Buttar, “most patients require less sleep and experience a better quality of sleep. … As time goes on, you'll experience various other changes … including diminished wrinkles, thicker skin, increased muscle strength and endurance, faster recovery, stronger libido, hair regrowth, increased emotional stability, higher energy levels, body contour changes and decreased chronic pain. In many instances, decades' worth of old aches, pains and injuries begin to disappear! You don't
need
to take Trans-D, but if you're interested in the possibility of increasing your life span, improving functionality and getting healthier, then you need to experience Trans-D firsthand.” So, according to Buttar, Trans-D makes you look better, live longer, sleep better, and have better sex—a sales pitch that harks back to Hamlin's Wizard Oil, Squire's Grand Elixir, Kickapoo Indian
Sagwa, and other cure-alls hawked in the 1800s. Trans-D goes for about two hundred dollars a bottle. Since 1998, more than 22 million doses have been sold. Along with his anti-autism cream, Trans-D has made Rashid Buttar a very rich man.

The final irony is that while Buttar is making a fortune selling unlicensed medical products of unproven value, he rails at Big Pharma. “The motivation of most pharmaceutical companies is to fund research where they can have a monopoly,” he writes, “where they can make a lot of money.” Michael Specter, a staff writer for
The New Yorker
, has commented on the contradiction. “We hate Big Pharma,” he says. “But we leap into the arms of Big Placebo.”

R
ashid Buttar asks his office staff to take an oath: “I vow to do more than my share in making the change the world is waiting for.” He asks his own children to take the same oath. Buttar believes he can chelate the world into better health. It's not just a philosophy; it's a mission—a mission based on the notion that doctors are evil and that mainstream medicine can't be trusted. “Doctors often expect patients to simply believe whatever they are told,” he writes. “Herein lies your first lesson. If a doctor becomes upset because you ask for more information or becomes nervous when you don't believe them simply because he or she ‘said so,' you need to find yourself a new doctor. Run. Don't walk. Remember that doctors are just human beings with a license to make life-and-death mistakes as long as they are using an approved method within the ‘standard of care.'”

Buttar believes that he, on the other hand, should be trusted
absolutely: “I want the person who comes to me and says, ‘I know what
the truth
is. I don't care about anything else.' I want you to start trusting me yesterday. That's my ideal patient. But someone who comes to me and says, ‘I don't know what this is, and what are the side effects of that?' Just go your own route. I'm here for the people who already
know
.” Buttar demands strict compliance with his philosophies: “There's no thinking there. I tell them I'm the general. If you want to win the race, then I have to hold the reins. And you do everything I ask you to do. If I ask you to stand on your head for four hours and chant a mantra, then you do it.”

To firm up the appeal, Buttar caters to his followers' sense of conspiracy, using the catchphrase “what your doctor won't tell you.” The implication is that doctors are saving the good therapies for themselves and their friends, their patients be damned. Buttar claims that as few as one in ten doctors with cancer actually get the radiation or chemotherapy recommended for them, presumably because doctors know better than to do what they recommend. And it's all part of a larger, far more heinous plot. “I was at a meeting at the Centers for Disease Control in early October,” says Buttar. “And behind closed doors, I was meeting with a very senior official, a scientist, and … I asked what is the number-one concern for the CDC right now. And he looks at me and very pointedly he says, ‘Rashid, we will deny this in public, you understand; nobody can admit to this. But the number-one concern is mercury.'”

Buttar's message is clear:
Trust me. Trust me because others mean to do you harm. Trust me because I, like you, have been treated badly. Trust me absolutely and without question. Trust me because the truth will set you free.
Buttar is in the company of charismatic
figures from Jim Jones to David Koresh: building a following with unfounded, illogical notions that—in the end—benefit no one.

Still, one could argue, where's the harm? If parents want to trust Buttar's unproven tests and magical potions, if they want to buy into his logic, if they want to believe there's a conspiracy by the government to deny them important therapies like his anti-autism cream and Trans-D, and if they want to spend much of their hard-earned money doing it, that's their decision. Unfortunately, Buttar's advice is potentially quite dangerous.

B
uttar's central premise is that the “medical establishment” offers unnatural and dangerous therapies. He claims that his therapies, on the other hand, are natural and harmless. Intravenous chelation therapy, however, is anything but harmless. Children who really do suffer from heavy-metal poisoning are given chelation therapy in the hospital, where their heart rhythms and blood chemistries are constantly monitored. Hospital monitoring is required because chelation medicines don't bind mercury and lead only—they also bind elements like calcium, which is necessary for electrical conductivity in the heart. In March 2006, the CDC published the stories of two children and one adult who had died from intravenous chelation. At the end of their report, CDC scientists made it clear what they thought about the unapproved use of chelation: “Certain healthcare practitioners have used chelation for autism in the belief that mercury or other heavy metals are producing the symptoms. These off-label uses of chelation therapy are
not supported by accepted scientific evidence
.”

T
here's another dangerous aspect to Rashid Buttar's rejection of conventional medicine. It relates to how he believed his son had become autistic. “Unbeknownst to me,” writes Buttar, “my now ex-wife had gotten Abie the regularly scheduled vaccines because she had listened to the fear-evoking propaganda fed to her by the pediatricians and the doctors at the hospital when she delivered.” Buttar believed that his son had been poisoned by thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative in vaccines, saying, “Thimerosal was the greatest atrocity ever committed to mankind in the name of money.” As a consequence, Buttar refused to vaccinate his third child (even though by that time thimerosal had been removed from all vaccines given to young infants) and, like Jenny McCarthy, is on a crusade to prevent others from vaccinating their children. “Nobody's giving my child any vaccine,” says Buttar. “I'll take my chances with smallpox or polio or hepatitis B. Am I afraid that he will become a doctor or a prostitute by the age of ten?”

Like his argument for heavy metals as the cause of seemingly all chronic diseases, Buttar's case against vaccines is ill-founded. First, studies have clearly shown that thimerosal in vaccines not only didn't cause autism; it didn't even cause subtle signs of mercury toxicity. Next, Buttar says he will take his chances with smallpox. Fair enough. Smallpox vaccines haven't been given to children since 1972—a consequence of the disease having been wiped off the face of the earth. Polio, on the other hand, is still around, having never been eliminated from countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria. People
traveling from these three countries have brought the disease to twenty other countries. Given the frequency of international travel, there's every reason to believe that the virus can spread further—especially if not enough people are immunized. Finally, Buttar underestimates the impact of hepatitis B virus in children. Before the CDC recommended a routine hepatitis B vaccine for infants in 1991, about sixteen thousand children below the age of ten got infected every year. About half caught the infection from their mothers during birth, the other half after they were born, usually from casual contact with people who didn't know they were infected. As the roughly 1 million Americans infected with hepatitis B virus will attest, you don't have to be a doctor or a prostitute to get the disease.