Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Bastard Who Invented Homeopathy

Episode Date: October 24, 2019

In Part Two, Robert is joined again by Billy Wayne Davis to continue discussing Samuel Hahnemann and homeopathy. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Pastors, back with Billy Wayne Davis for part two of our homeopathy episode. And Providence, I think God himself has presented us Billy Wayne with an opportunity here. I think that's how medicine works. Super producer Sophie has an earache that is rather painful at the moment. She's not sure why and traditional medicine has not dealt with it. It hurts. What kind of pain? It's like throbbing. Like actual pain?

Yeah. Like the inside of the ear? Yeah. Did you stick anything in there? I mean, I just put no. You can rupture your ear drum. I don't think it's that. It doesn't feel like that because I can still hear. Wouldn't I not be able to hear? I don't know if that's how it works.

What I do know is that it's time to test machetes and out. Now, we have to do this as a double blind study, which means Sophie, you're going to close your eyes. Then we have to make you blind twice. We're going to hand you both a machete and another kind of non-machete knife and you have to hit something with both. Then you tell us which one you feel better after. That will be a real medical study that will forever prove the validity of machetes. Can you just make sure Anderson doesn't get harmed? Anderson, your mom's blind and wielding machete. Come over here.

Come on. Your mom's blind and wielding machete. Good Anderson. Get over here. Good girl. No, don't be right under her with the machete. She's protecting me. She's a bodyguard. Okay, sorry. You've got to close your eyes. You can't know what you're getting first. She's under the table. You've got to close your eyes.

We're giving you a random bladed object. May or may not be a machete. No way to know. No way to know. It's definitely not a machete. My eyes are closed. I can tell by the weight. I'm going to guide your hand down towards the object. The copy-based instinct that you're going to hit just so you know where it is. Now, rear up and hit it real hard.

Anderson's okay? Yeah, Anderson's fine. Okay. All right. That's the first one. That's the first one. Now, let's scientifically note, do you feel any different in your ears? Hmm. No. No. Okay, now close your eyes. Close your eyes.

Giving you another random bladed object. No way to know what it is. Now, I'm going to guide your hand down again to the copy of basic instinct. You might want to scoot back just a little bit so you can get more strength. You still safe, Anderson? Now, again, rear up with all your might and just whack it. Whack it real good. Holy shit, that felt good to watch.

Now, Sophie, you don't know in either case what you were holding. No, yeah, it's powerful. Does your ear feel better? Hold on. We have a sport to play after this. Don't fuck up our balls. How's your ear feeling? It still hurts, but my ego...

Oh, sorry. It still hurts, but my ego feels great. Which is an important part of the healing process. I feel emotionally powerful. It's good yogurt, right? Do you feel confident? Yeah. That was a funny way to answer that question.

Do you feel confident? Yeah. My dog wasn't harmed, so that's always good. Okay. Which felt better? The big one. Yeah. So...

What if you knew how to use the little one better? I mean, that would just be a completely different study. I'm doing a shitty metaphor right there. We would have to do some research, really. I'm not a scientist. Nor am I a doctor. But I think this scientifically proves that Michettison is a valid branch of medical science. She's still here.

Yep. You're not dead. And I think your ear's gonna heal as a result of this. If you do get better, it's because of the machete or the dagger. We don't know, because this was not in the actuality of double-blind study. Mm-hmm. But it might mean that just mixing types of knives is... I just came up with the first principle of machettison.

What's that? Well, with homeopathy, it's like-cures-like. And with machettison, it's knife-cures-knife. Oh. Yep. Now we've got an actual practice. I see what's happening here. Marketing.

Hot. Also, more is more. More is more. The more knives you got, the better you are as a doctor. Shit. Oh, so loud. I have some uncles that are gonna be the best doctors in the world. They're still alive.

They're gonna assume Proctor Hawk. I don't know doctor talk. My brother is a doctor. He is a doctor. And I'm sure your brother will agree when he hears this episode that this is... My brother doesn't listen to my podcasts. He's out there saving lives. Well, he would be saving more lives if he listened to this study we just conducted.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And the rare chance you do listen to this. Hi, Jake. Jake, give up conventional medicine. Start practicing machettison. Machettison. Doctor...

More is more. Dr. Jake Lichterman. Machettison. We should probably bleep that name out. Nope. It cures low T. It cures baldness. It definitely cures low T.

Erectile dysfunction. Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm. Don't even need a dick when you got a knife. You don't. Now! Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Wow. Let's start this episode five and a half minutes later. We had to test machettison, Sophie. Sorry. So over five million American adults and one million American children currently use homeopathy on a regular basis. Which is too many. So there is a decent chance that some of the people listening to this podcast may regularly use or have used homeopathic products.

I think they probably tuned out after the first episode. I would hope so. So I don't think they make it to this one. We were more positive about the founder of homeopathy than any of our other fake doctors. It's hard not. I mean, he's not clearly... Yeah. He's clearly not a bastard.

He's clearly not. Doing his best. He's misguided the best. Yeah. Now, I'm not going to tell anybody not to take homeopathic medicine because I eat my weight in narcotic leaves every six months. So, hey, who am I to tell people what's unhealthy? But we are going to talk about a lot of dead babies today because of homeopathy. Yeah.

Yep. Now, first off, I should start by saying that for the record, homeopathy is pretty conclusively proven to be bullshit even after that 1835 double-blind study. I don't even feel comfortable calling it snake oil because there actually is an actual snake oil that's an ancient Chinese medicine that actually has anti-inflammatory properties with testable impacts on the human body. Well, and now they're testing vipers. They think it can cure certain types of cancer. There's a lot of different medicines in snakes. Yeah.

A snake is like, when I get sick, I just go roll around in a pile of snakes. God, that just gave me the... I know you were kidding, but still there's a part of me that's like, don't do that. I'm a big snake fan. And are you? Oh, yeah. I think machetesan and snakedesan are complementary. It's like being an oncologist and also other type of doctor.

I don't know medicine. What I do know... I got that on that one. I don't even know which one that was. There have been a lot of studies in homeopathic medicine to see how it works. I don't want to quote all of those, so I found a fun analysis of 17 of those studies on the efficacy of homeopathy in the Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. Its title is a systematic review of systematic reviews of homeopathy, just so we can start this episode by conclusively stating it doesn't work. Quote,

11 independent systematic reviews were located. Similarly, there was no homeopathic remedy that was demonstrated to yield clinical effects that are convincingly different from placebo. Okay. Yeah. One thing that'll sometimes be used as like evidence that homeopathy works is you'll have some cases where like, oh, if you actually look at this, the homeopathic group actually did slightly better than the placebo group and it's like, yeah, yeah, but you have to do better over a certain margin. Yeah.

It's like, if you're giving people like, like you're testing it in neurological medicine, it has to help more than a certain percentage of people because the placebo effect is going to help a certain percentage. Exactly. Yeah. So anyway, homeopathy doesn't do anything. Now, I should also note that homeopathic doctors do occasionally attempt to carry out their own scientific studies, much like the studies we just carried out in this room, and about as valid as the studies we carried out in this room. I was going to say, I bet they're as thought out too.

Yeah. Now, unfortunately, while the machetesan studies were carried out on consenting patient and adult Sophie Lichterman, homeopathic studies are not always carried out on people who can properly consent to them. In fact, sometimes they test random substances on impoverished children in the global south. Yay. Yay. There exists in this beautiful, dumb, nuclear-armed nation of ours an organization called the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. One of the things this publicly funded government entity does is test the efficacy of alternative medicine.

Now, this is something I get frustrated about. I don't like the term alternative medicine. There's no such thing as alternative medicine. No. Medicine is either medicine or it's not. Well, by definition, an alternative to medicine would be poison. Exactly. Yeah.

It's like the acid drink the guy made. Yeah. That's what an alternative to medicine is. Oh, it made it worse. Yeah. And I should state in some earlier episodes of this, I made fun of taking turmeric for everything under the sun, because if you go to a health food store in Los Angeles or a lot of hippercities, you'll find turmeric on the shelves for fucking everything.

Turmeric has actual medicinal properties. It's a powerful anti-inflammatory. It does things. There are things that you can do with turmeric. I'm a big fan of Plantago Major, which is plantain leaf, and it's a leaf that's been used for thousands of years to treat wounds in societies around the world. And because it's an actual medicine, there are scientific studies that have confirmed that it does in fact speed up the healing of wounds. So none of this stuff is alternative.

No, it's just what it does. It's just a thing that does something. It's a medicine. It just dudes didn't make it. So now dudes are like, well, that's alternative medicine. They're like, no, what you do is technically alternative medicine. Yeah. Because the earth has been medicine in itself for a long time.

Yeah, that's why people like fucking Dr. Hahn made it to 89. Yes. Yeah. Some shit did work back then. Now, when I found out there was a government center aimed at testing alternative medicine, I was a little bit pissed. But then I read the results of a study that they conducted in El Salvador, and that made me really angry.

And now I'm going to read you the abstract from this, Billy Wins, that you can get angry too. Thanks. I'm just going to make sure this VHS tape of basic instinct is near your stab at hand. Do get a knife here. Background, despite the widespread availability of oral rehydration therapy, diarrheal illness remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality around the world. Previous studies have shown individualized homeopathic therapy to be effective in treating childhood diarrhea. But this approach requires specialized training.

Objective, homeopathic combination medicine, if effective, could be used by health personnel on a widespread basis. Methods, a double-blind randomized controlled trial was conducted in Honduras to evaluate the effectiveness of a homeopathic combination therapy to treat acute diarrhea in children. A total of 292 children with acute diarrhea were recruited. 145 were randomized to the experimental group, and 147 to the placebo group. Tablets contained a combined preparation of the five most common single homeopathic remedies used to treat diarrhea, or placebo were administered by a parent after each unformed stool. So that's good. Okay.

They're dosing a bunch of kids. And the study found nothing. It admitted that there was no significant difference in the likelihood of resolution of diarrheal symptoms for the group that took homeopathic medicine. Yeah, because it's nothing. Because you hope it's nothing. That's kind of where we're building to here. Oh, no. Yeah.

Now, the benefit of homeopathy over other kinds of fake medicine is that at least it is just harmless water. Yes. But not actually all the time. I found a fun article on science-based medicine, a wonderful website, which digs into the details of this particular study. And it suggests that they might have slightly poisoned some poor sick kids in El Salvador, or Honduras, sorry. It turns out that two of the most popular substances used in homeopathic diarrhea treatments are arsenic and podophyllum. Now, you know what arsenic is. I'm aware.

Yeah, it's not great. No. You know what podophyllum is? Nope. It is a wart remover so strong it is illegal to be administered outside of a doctor's office by a doctor. It's a wart remover? Yeah. Yeah.

That cannot be sold over the counter. Is it one that burns it off of you? Yeah. But it's one that a doctor has to give you. Yeah. I used to have some, I had them frozen off and then I had one burned off with a laser. Yeah, yeah. That's cooler than the podophyllum.

It smells terrible. It's awful. Yeah, but... Probably not as bad as the diarrhea ward after these kids were given non-sick medicine. I just can't imagine. Yeah. I just... Fuck.

Yeah. Now, the writer of that science-based medicine article notes, I wonder if the IRB, which is like the board that reviews studies and stuff from cases like this, knew that these were the ingredients being used, granted they are so dilute there is nothing left, but there was no data presented to show that these components had actually been diluted that much, and therefore posed no threat to the study subjects. Think of it this way. If the remedy has any active ingredients, it's potentially toxic. If it is truly homeopathic, then it's nothing more than 80% ethanol and sugar.

Okay. So, the best case scenario is that these publicly funded researchers, who you and I paid for, Billy Wayne, found a bunch of poor sick kids and then gave them nonsense water and pretended it was medicine. The worst case scenario is that they poisoned sick children with arsenic and wart remover. And it's not a silly fear to be afraid that they might accidentally poison some kids, because it's not uncommon for homeopaths to fuck up the dilution process and dose children poison. Because they're not scientists. Because they're not scientists.

They're not trained to mix chemicals like that. No. And the... Yeah. There's actually a number of reasons. So, we're going to talk about that more in a second. For one moment, I want to revel in the last paragraph from that homeopathic study. And this is them trying to like figure out,

well, why didn't this work? Why didn't it make the kids better? A number of factors could account for the ineffectiveness of the homeopathic combination therapy. Although the homeopathic remedies included in the combination therapy were those most commonly prescribed in the previous studies, it is possible that these remedies would not have been prescribed individually in this population and or that a different combination medicine would have been more effective. There's also a possibility that the remedies included in the combination therapy counteracted each other in some way, rendering the individual remedies ineffective.

Other factors could be that the therapy was not correctly administered by parents in this study. So, it's like, ah, they probably fucked up by giving their kids the poison water wrong. That's who did it. That's who fucked it up. Not us. Yeah. And I also love that, like, they're being like, well, homeopathies worked in the past on periapatients.

Yeah, if you give people diarrhea water, you hydrate them. Usually, they don't die. Yes. If you keep people hydrated, the body does some crazy, wonderful stuff every fucking time. Yeah. Which is why Samuel Hahnman lived to be 89. Because he drank a lot of water.

Super hydrated guy. Yeah. Now, at one point, Billy Wayne, this was meant to be a one-parter episode. But then I googled my way across a Scientific American article with one of the most horrifying titles I've ever read. You ready for this? Yep. Hundreds of babies harmed by homeopathic remedies families say.

Dammit. Just, can you imagine writing that? Yeah. And then they added to be like, ah, make it sexier. There's never been a good story that's opened with hundreds of babies. You just don't, nothing good's gonna come after that. I mean, ah. What a time we live in, too.

We're like, I think you gotta go, you gotta start with the hundreds of babies. Yeah, that's the lead, is hundreds of babies. We need them to click on it. Dammit. It opens with a case from August 1st, 2010. A mother gives her toddler three homeopathic pills to leave her teething pain. Oh, 2010? Within minutes, the baby stops breathing.

My daughter had a seizure, lost consciousness, and stopped breathing for about 30 minutes after I gave her three Highland's teething tablets. The mother later told the Food and Drug Administration. She had to receive mouth-to-mouth CPR to resume breathing and was brought to the hospital. So, Highland's teething tablets. Fuck you. 2010. There's way more recent cases than that.

Oh, I got it. Oh, yeah, you stuck it in the basic instinct copy, nailing it. That is helpful in dealing with your feelings. It makes. Thank you, Paul Verhoeven. Are you healed? No, not yet. I mean, I have an eight-month-old, so it's just this...

I don't, okay. Yeah, it's not great. It's not great. This is not going to be an easy one. So Highland's, the company that made those homeopathic pills, bills itself is providing safe, effective, and natural health solutions to parents looking to avoid the danger of modern pharmaceuticals. They sell a wide variety of products for people of all ages. Their website presents the image of a healthy and legitimately medicinal product.

I'm going to show you that, Bill. You want to describe this website to our audience? Yes, yes. It does. There's two young people running at sunset on the ocean. The healthiest time and place to run. It is, since 1903. That means it's good. It does.

Now, it looks, even the Highland's logo looks like a Purdue type. Like Pfizer. Yeah, that's it. It looks like one of those. Everything does, it looks like a vague drug ad. Yeah. Is what it looks like. And it's interesting that they choose that because like one of the reasons that these

products are so popular is that like the pharmaceutical industry is fucked and like sells people a lot of dangerous shit and markets a lot of dangerous shit like just for sheer profit. And yet at the same time, while you're profiting off of the fact that people don't trust the pharmaceutical industry for good reason, you're also in order to make your product look more like medicine, aping the pharmaceutical industry's branding, which is really interesting to me. Well, I think it's smart because the pharmaceutical industry brands everything in a way, not because they've done the research to be like, this is the best way to sell this stuff.

So that's pretty smart. They're just copying pharmaceutical people's research. One of my favorite things to do when I'm really high is to watch pharmaceutical ads and work backwards. And one of the things I've realized is that if you're selling a pill that helps people shit, you show them jogging. Always jogging. Yeah, because that's why you can't jog if you can't shit.

You can't. No, you cannot. You don't want to go jogging. Now, in tiny text on the top of Hyland's website, there's a little bit of text that I want to read you, Billy Wayne. Claims based on traditional homeopathic practice, not accepted medical evidence, not FDA evaluated. Copy that. Copy that.

Unlike Michettison, which I'm proud to announce as a result of our double blind study now has complete FDA approval. My ear, it's healed. Thank you, Sophie. No, it's not. You can buy a Michettison starter kit. Yeah, we're going to bleep that out. We are now selling Michettison starter kits.

Again, you get a free Michetti with every $500 copy of Michetti, your way to better health. That's a good deal, you guys. That is a great deal. That is a good deal. Because separately, over $1,000. And confirmed by the FDA to cure what ails you. Absolutely FDA approved. Come at me, motherfuckers.

FDA stands for Freddie, Danny, and Alex. Now, Highland's products have names that are crosses between hypermodern medicine and ancient snake oil remedies. You can buy Nuxvomica, which sounds like something a Roman doctor would prescribe, and Bioplasma, which sounds like something you'd pick up in a space first person shooter video game. Bioplasma? Yeah. Or it sounds like something you sell in college to get beer money.

Yeah, it does. You sell your Bioplasma? Yeah, me too. Yeah, I did, man. I got a good deal on it. I got $400 a month for it. There's a guy in the van. He wants it good.

All that Bioplasma's paying from a tattoo. You can't tell them I'm getting tattoos. Don't tell them. Do not let them know. They do not want you getting stick and poked. So you can find Nuxvomica and Bioplasma on the Highland's online store. What you won't find on that site is their homeopathic teething tablets and gels. You know why?

No. Scientific Americans going to tell you why. Babies who were given Highland's teething products turned blue and died. Babies had repeated seizures. Babies became delirious. Babies were airlifted to the hospital where emergency room staff tried to figure out what caused their legs and arms to start twitching. Not a great paragraph.

Fuck. Yeah. Not a great paragraph. Is it still up? No. They did eventually stop selling the poison. Okay. The baby poison.

Highland's all-natural baby killer pills. We just had to rename it. Sad to give a new name. Yeah. Tell them what we actually do. This is so fucked. I will say I would support if they marketed them as baby killing pills. That would not be unethical.

I don't. I wouldn't have a problem with that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to get into kids under the name like Uncle Gonzo's bubblegum flavored cancer stick. But Highland's still exist, doesn't it? Oh yeah.

Highland's is still around. Yeah. They're never going to die. No. Yeah. No, they're not. Over a 10-year period from 2006 to 2016. That's still their image on their website.

Yeah. I just pulled it up when I was doing the research. That's like, yeah. Yeah. Over a 10-year period from 2006 to 2016, the FDA collected reports of adverse events and more than 370 children who had used Highland's homeopathic teething tablets or gel, a similar product that is applied directly to a baby's gums. Agency records show eight cases in which babies were reported to have died after taking

Highland's products. Though the FDA says the question of whether those products caused the deaths is still under review. Following an FDA warning in September, Highland said it would no longer manufacture the teething products. But they remained on some store shelves for months and are still available on the internet. They likely continue to be used in homes nationwide. That's great.

I love the kind of logic for a company like Highland's where they're like... They have so many products on their website. Yeah, they do. Well, when we gave our water to diarrhea patients, they got better, which means homeopathy works. But when all these babies took our teething pills and died, there's no evidence. Yeah, we know. It's connected to the teething pills. Prove it.

Yeah. That sucks. But the money truck keeps showing up. Yeah, we all have so much money. Can't let just some of a couple of dead babies get away the money truck. Yeah, exactly. That's why you get a money truck with big wheels. Roll right over them babies.

Oh, yeah. Speaking of running over babies... No, no, no, no, no. Is that a bad way to go into ads? No, no, no, no. It's bad. Speaking of babies living forever. Forever babies.

These products and services that advertise on our show will make your babies live longer than Highland's all-natural baby killing pills. Is that good? Guarantee. Guarantee. I feel like we can safely make that claim. But if the FDA wants to come at me, go for it. Products!

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in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods. He's a shark. And not in the good-bad-ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven.

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I think this is the administration to taunt the FDA yet. Yeah. I think we're okay. I think we're okay. They do not have a lot of teeth these days. No. Yeah. So, yeah, the probable culprit for all these baby deaths is a key ingredient in Hyland's

teething products, atropa belladonna, yeah, deadly nightshade, which is one of the plants that Samuel Hahnemann was a big fan of using in his homey head ahead as kids pick it all the time. He used to give his kids that. Yeah. It is not something, in case the name deadly nightshade did not key you in, it is not something you should give to children or anyone. I don't know anyone unless you're doing a murder.

Yeah. If you're murdering someone, solid pick. Getting that murder. Mm-hmm. Now, homeopathic medicine is supposed to be so diluted that literally no molecules of the original substance remains, but in practice, homeopaths kind of fuck up sometimes. In 2010, FDA inspectors at a Hyland facility reported substandard manufacturing processes and inconsistent levels of belladonna in their products.

That is a nice way of saying not all of their water had the poison diluted out of it. It's like animals. Yeah. Where, sure, we'd like to say that's 10 milligrams, but they don't know. Mm-hmm. One of them might be 10, and then the one next to it might be zero. It's all in one thing. It's...

Yeah. It's not science. They're not doing science. They're doing money. They're doing money. And they're great at money. They make billions of dollars. Yes.

All these companies. Because you don't have to have a product. It's frustrating because people rightly, like we just did an episode on the Sacklers and the opioid industry. They rightly are like, oh, the pharmaceutical industry is fucked up. Yes. And instead, they just go to another company that's just as bad, but at least those pills get you high.

Well, it's... It's like going like McDonald's is shitty. I'm going to Burger King. You're like, okay, dude. It's like that brief period when McDonald's was trying to get everyone on board salads. That killed me. Who would choose Burger King over McDonald's? No, I agree, but that's the point I'm making.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For fuck's sake. They're both garbage. Oh, yeah. McDonald's preservatives do taste better. They do. Yeah. They do, and their fries are better.

I was about to say, if we're measuring by one thing, it has to be by the fry quality. Behind the Basterds is, of course, supported by McDonald's and their corporate masters, Nordine Defense Systems. Nordine Defense Systems, whether you want French fries or a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. We got you. We got you. We're killing it. We're shooting kids.

Oh. We're killing it. Oh, it's kind of really dark. Can you continue? That's a double meaning. That is a double meaning. They're doing really well as a company, and they're also murdering people. And they're also murdering people.

I could go and advertise it, really. You could. Well, hire us, corporate America. Yeah. Now, after the first deaths, the FDA issued a public warning that there were, quote, reports of serious adverse events in children taking this product that are consistent with Belladonna toxicity. We just want to let everybody know that that might kill your baby.

And that is how you say they're poisoning babies with Belladonna without saying they're poisoning. There's reports of serious events in children taking this product that are consistent with the poisons in the product. Yeah. Serious event just happened. The FDA further warned that little babies are particularly vulnerable to the neurotoxic poison because they're babies, and quote, the absorption of Belladonna from the skin

and mouth is fairly rapid in babies. Yeah. Because they're just weak little goos. Because they're weak little goos. Yeah. Yes. They're given, for example, Belladonna. Anything but milk.

Anything but milk, really. Like you avoid perfume around babies, right? Yes. Yeah, it's not great. They're tiny. They're not like horses. They're not tough. Yeah.

Their skull's not even finished. They're missing most of the good bones. They only got the crappy bones at first. Just give it some. You got to let them cook. Try the thing that's called deadly. Give it to the baby. So this is the deadly nightshade, that's the one for a baby.

Should we start with just the okay nightshade? No. No, try the deadly one. Try it. Now, Highlands has been in the fake medicine business for 114 years. They're based right here in the city of Los Angeles. I guarantee. Yeah, that is not surprising.

They are the largest homeopathic business in the United States. They claim their products are safe, and that there's no proven scientific link between their teething products and infant seizures or deaths. Spokeswoman Mary Bornman said, A point of view. What a point of view. Here's our stance. There's no scientific proof we killed those babies. Which is only a sentence said by good people.

Yes. I'm going to quote from spokeswoman Mary Bornman talking to Scientific American. That doesn't mean that children don't have a sensitivity to a product. There's a lot of sensitivity on kids' parts, and we have to watch carefully. It's not something that condemns the entire product line. Can you imagine sitting across from her, and she said that? I love the question, because then she's saying, like, there's no proof that there's a link between our teething products and infant seizures, but infants might be sensitive to the poison

in our teething products. But that doesn't mean that our teething products are deadly. That's your weak-ass baby fault. That's your weak-ass baby. Toughen that, son of a bitch. Yeah, once you get a tough baby, and then we'll come talk. You tried giving him scotch? Oh, hold on, hold on.

Wait, wait, just a second. Is your baby a pussy? That's what happened. And if your baby is a weak, limp-wristed little sucker, I have a suggestion for how to toughen your baby up. Machete-son. Machete-son. Now, Machete-son sells new baby's machetes, which are only $700 each.

Now, a lot of parents, they're going to spend money on an expensive crib, Billy Wayne, on an ice car seat. No. They're going to get you as far as a $700 baby machete. It is, yes. Razor sharp. The sharpest. Because babies don't have a lot of arm strength.

So when they hit something, if you really want them to cut into it, it's got to be the sharpest machete. And it needs a little size to it, so it also carries the weight. Yeah, you want some weight. A good children's machete should be 70% of the weight of the baby. And it does most of the work. It does most of the work. Just letting gravity pull it down.

Yeah, that's true. And the baby's machetes have slings, so you can use the machete to carry your baby. That is true. And I would have one if my wife wasn't smart, but I've married a smart lady. Anyway, mail $700 to behind the bastards. Just stick it in an envelope, put it in there, write machete on the envelope, and we'll get to it. No address, and we will find you.

We will find that money. We don't. Yes. You send us the money, and we will find you with the machete. Yeah. We don't need your address, or phone number, or name. That's the behind the bastards promise. Send us the money.

We'll find you with the machete. We'll find you with the prep. So yeah, it's frustrating. It took four years for the FDA to get Highlands to change their recipes to something hopefully less dangerous. Guys, I hear, hey, another email. Just a quick gentle reminder, stop putting poison in your baby stuff. Maybe don't.

Yeah. Memo to staff. R.E. Poison pills for babies. Hey. Maybe not. Maybe Highlands FDA again. I know I'm being a pain, but could you guys stop doing the poison in the babies? No?

Okay, we'll try back in. Okay, we'll try back another time. See if you guys change your mind. We're patient here. Now, while Highlands did change their recipe, in the years since, the parade of deaths and seizures continued. No way. From Scientific American.

No way. In case 462749 dated September 15th, 2011, a physician sent Highlands a handwritten note stating his patient, a five month old girl, was unresponsive for 45 minutes after taking its teething tablets. I am sure this was not an allergic reaction. He wrote, I would like you to report it. Find a contact at the FDA so we can start an investigation and pull this dangerous unregulated product from the shelves.

One mother wrote the company to say her son's pupils dilated like marbles with big black eyes. Another described seizures her daughter continued to have after taking the tablets and told the company, I hate, hate, hate you for this. Reasonable response. That's actually kind of a tepid response. Yeah. Maybe the third hate.

Oh, no, there's three. Fourth hate. That might have been good. Or a fucking. Yeah. Good time for a fucking. Just like a white powder in that envelope too. You know, I was going to say, going on this episode, there's no justified time to send,

boy, I shouldn't talk about mailing powders through the, nope, let's just move right along. Karina Talbot, a 26 year old mother, told Scientific American that she picked Highland's teething products because they were marketed as natural and clearly natural is better than whatever unnatural stuff is in the teething products that don't contain Philadelphia doesn't. These suckers gave their kid pacifiers. Those don't have any poison in them at all. It is God. The leaps the human brain makes.

I think he goes, I mean, he goes seems to be really involved in a lot of this stuff. Well, you go and I think just a lot of it's just, you know, there's so much information to take in. Yeah. And people, average people aren't necessarily great at credibly reviewing sources and like you have a lot of friends who are like, oh no, my, my kid, and there is stuff where like I was just talking about pacifiers, but like there have been cases where like pacifiers made by some shady company in a bad factory and like China or something like lead on them

and shit. Like it does. Like there's a lot of shit gets in the fucking formula to exactly one. Things perfect and so people like see natural on a label and assume it really means something and also assumes that natural, like, like they don't think about the fact that like rice is natural. Yes. Like, yes.

Well, like the, and they don't, like my dad makes that joke is like organic. Yeah. He's like, what's that mean? Yeah. He's like, it, it's mostly about a marketing buzzword at this point, like they're like, which is not to say that there's not some like some of the practices that are advocated by that crowd can be good, but like the actual legal definition is very easy to game. Oh, it's so easy.

And like, you talk about like people like, oh, it only uses organic pesticides. Have you ever been on a farm that's been sprayed with organic pesticides? It's just like as much sulfur as you could fit in a can. Yes. That's all it is. That's not good for you. No. And that's not even the right way to do that.

Organic stuff. Like my friend that lives in Eugene, he's a professional cannabis grower and they grow it organically, but it's all from like other plants he's mixing and it's insane what he does. Yeah. But what he was like, what these other people call organic is not, he's like, he learned from this Korean, this old Korean man. It's like, sorry, okay.

We're all being marketed to all the time by everyone and it's one of the reasons why, and I don't want to make like Karina Tal, but the mother here who like picked these teething products because they're natural, that'd be a bad person, like there's so much shit out there that like people make bad decisions by definition because there's it's so hard to pick the good information from the bad and it's just, it's complicated. And it's our government, the FDA should do more to make it very clear, to stop a company like Highlands from making themselves look like a legitimate pharmaceutical company, for example.

It just has to be clear what you are. Yeah. Yes. I totally agree. Highlands brand nonsense water now with poison. Yes. That's a fair. I'm fine.

You can have that product. Yeah. So I'm going to quote from Karina Tal, but again, when our fourth kiddo comes around and starts teething at three months, we were like, okay, well, what can we do to give him some relief? Someone told us about the teething tablets and we thought give them a try. So she gave her son some Highlands teething products and his hands started twitching then his feet.

The twitching got worse over the course of several days and it took a while for she and her husband to realize the little seizures were related to the teething tablets. When she stopped dosing her son, he stopped seizing. Now, this represents one of the better case scenarios. The worst case scenario is FDA case 10723317, a mother who, in 2014, gave her nine month old daughter two teething tablets, quote. She gave her infant the tablets, then a bottle, then left her to sleep. When she checked on her 45 minutes later, she was dead in her crib beside a puddle of

vomit. God. Yeah. Now, five months later, the mother of this deceased child read online that babies had suffered seizures after taking Highlands baby killin' pills, shows she reached out to them. And here's Scientific American talking about Highlands response to this. I bet it was good.

I bet it was up there with, like, spectrum. You might need the big knife for this one, Billy. Customer did not request a refund or replacement, noted this Highlands staffer who filed the report with the FDA. Highlands also noted that it was not able to test the bottle because the customer threw it away. Due to the limited information provided by the reporter, no further investigation is possible at the time of this incident.

The company concluded, there's just nothing we can do about this dead baby. Made a case. Ah, man. She didn't save the bottle. Ah, that's real unfortunate. Whoever the boss was at Highlands, like, who's our best sociopath? Yeah. Who is our worst person?

Let's get them on this. He's just a Christian bail character in the corner just stabbing a lady. Yeah. What? Oh, I'll do it. Hey, Jim, there's more dead kids. We need you to send a real bad email. Ah, time to get to work.

Now, the FDA could do a lot more to police homeopathic medicine, but dealing with homeopathic medicine is generally low on their priority list. Do you want to talk to these idiots? Yeah, there's an aspect to which that's fair because the idea is that homeopathic remedies are just water. So, like, you can see how the FDA would prioritize, like, oh, there's people bleaching their kid's assholes to stop autism. That's got to be a priority over the water selling.

Yes. Nonsense. Like, you can see the logic there. And also, like, all the other pill companies, they keep trying to just make all the illegal drugs legal and change the name. So we're focused on that, too, right now. Which we should just let people do so that I can bite a lot in the grocery store again. But that's aside the point.

And a personal issue more than a societal thing, I was talking about. So yeah, all this stuff that we've been talking about, Billy, gets more attention from the FDA's limited resources than homeopathy. But that's not the only reason regulators take a light hand in the baby poisoning industry. See, the complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM lobby, is the official lobbying arm of homeopathy and other sorts of, you know, alternative medical treatments. Yeah, why wouldn't they need a lobbyist? Of course.

Just like pharmaceutical companies. Because they've looked around. They spend millions of dollars in lobbying, too. We're not shady enough, yes. Let's do what the pharmacy... We're not like pharmaceutical companies. You can trust us. But also, let's do everything pharmaceutical companies do.

Could you get a hand on their business? Because they make so much money. They print it. Yeah. They don't have to spend any money even researching medicine. Pretending to research. We can just put poison in water and give it to babies. The fucking margins on that shit?

Wild. Yes. Back in 2013, they lobbied for a clause in the Affordable Care Act, Section 2706, which would have forced insurance companies to pay for so-called alternative medicine. This language was added to the ACA by Senator Tom Harkin, a lobbyist for the American Chiropractic Association, and a member of the Integrative Health Policy Consortium, or IHPC. Yeah. According to...

Lobbyist, Senator. Mm-hmm. Jesus Christ. It's all fine. Just the chiropractic. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Which we know is good.

According to Forbes, quote, it is virtually certain that lobbyists wrote that section, and Harkin simply inserted it into the law. The IHPC is a lobbying group dedicated to obtaining more government money for homeopathy, naturopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, and a raft of other ineffectual medical practices. Now, Section 2706 is not all bad, just as the world of complementary medicine is an all-bunk'em, but it does mean that in addition to guaranteeing taxpayer funding for debatably useful things, it may also have meant more taxpayer dollars for businesses like Highlands. In general, the CAM lobby fights to have their medicine treated as medicine for the purpose

of insurance billing, but not treated as medicine for the purpose of making sure it's safe and effective to give to babies. Oh, it's a profit. We want to sell it like medicine, but we don't want to have to prove that it works or is safe like medicine. Yeah. Do you see why this is fair? Yeah.

This is how it should be. Yeah. They're the Reverend R&B singers. Yeah. That's the Christian rock and roll of medicine. Yes. Yes. Now, we love Jesus as they snort cocaine and have sex on their bus.

But we don't pay tax. But we don't have to pay taxes, which means more cocaine. Always party with the Christian rock band if you get the chance. If you do get a chance, it is fun. It is a great time. They're good musicians too. They just don't. They don't do it on stage, but you get them back on that bus, do a couple of lines.

Yeah. They like all the same music. Then you get the black Sabbath. Just a weird curtain to pull behind you. What in the fuck? Oh, it's a money thing. It's a grift. Okay.

Okay. Now, the CAM lobby and the money that they spend lobbying is part of why it took so many years for the FDA to push Highlands to reformulate their famous baby killing pills. Part of why, when Highlands did reformulate that shit, they didn't necessarily make it less toxic. Sarah Sorcher, an attorney for the Public Citizen Health Research Group, told Scientific American this, the FDA could bring the hammer down on them, but it doesn't. At the point where you have infants being hospitalized and deaths reported, it's simply

not acceptable for the agency to delay in taking action. Seems fair. Yeah. The FDA's drug division determines whether or not a product on the market is unsafe, but in order to make that determination, the FDA relies heavily on reports from actual doctors in the field in which drugs and drug-like substances are killing people. This is a particular problem with homeopathic products because they're supposed to just be water, which means physicians rarely think to ask if a patient has been taking homeopathic

teething pills. Dr. Edward Boyer, a Harvard toxicologist who works at the Harvard Medical School, told Scientific American this, if I'm working in the emergency room and I have a family that comes in with a seizing infant, I may not have the wherewithal to get the history of homeopathic use. You're not going to assume it's the water pills, so it means that they don't notice a lot of the time this contributes to an illness. When you don't think you're giving them anything, so why would you tell them?

Exactly. It's natural. Yeah. It's like, yeah. I gave them extra kale or something. Now what is natural, Billy Wayne, is our homegrown medical machetes. Every one of our machetes is grown organically on an organic industrial factory in El Salvador. The good part of El Salvador.

The good part of El Salvador. They're very not corrupt. Only the most natural polymers, plastics, and carbon steel are used in the organic growth of our health machetes. They have the best polymer trees. The best polymer trees, by far, by far. It's a fact. Some Belladonna included.

That's services. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. This season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sophie we're back.

How's your ear feeling? Better? Now my heart hurts from hearing how horrible these people are. Oh yeah, everything's heavy right now. Yeah. It is heavy. But I don't think that's true. I'm just like really fucking angry.

But I am. It's pretty bad, huh? Usually. It's numbing. My anger is numbing my ear pain because I'm just, I can't think about anything else. That's the machete, actually. That's why behind the bastards the podcast is FDA supported to treat all kinds of aches and pains.

I also thought, you know, Anderson would look pretty cool with a little dog machete. Oh yeah. Now our dog machete vertical is going to take off in a Q2 of 2020. Cool, cool, cool. Yeah, it's hard to make a machete that a dog's paws can hold, but we're working on it. We figured it out though. We have top men on the project. We used deadly nightshade.

Only top men. Top men and women. Thank you. And agender machete experts. I don't know. Thank you. Top whatever's. They're fluid.

They're fluid, just like our new liquid metal machetes. Oh, that would be cool. Yeah, it will be cool. Q4 2020. Just in time. Yeah, it's going to be, we're going to need them then. Now the good news is that in December of 2016, more than half a decade after the first deaths we reported, Highlands pulled their baby nighttime teething tablets off the shelves.

They were adamant that their safety standards were incredibly stringent and a frame this is basically we have to pull this stuff from the shelves because the FDA is a bunch of dicks. That's the only reason. Dad doesn't get me. Meanies. Fucking dad. A Highlands representative told Scientific American, homeopathic medicine has a very

large margin of safety. Our testing ensures there's not too much Belladonna in any bottle. If there's any Belladonna in a teething product, it's too much. There's not a lot. It's these pussy babies. On January 27th, 2017, the United States Food and Drug Administration posted this fun press release. FDA confirms elevated levels of Belladonna and certain homeopathic teething products.

You can't stop these people from putting poison in baby pills. They just love it. Why? Because they're just, they're not taking the proper precautions, but I don't have to. That's okay. That is exactly it. If humans don't have to, they don't do it.

Yeah. It's like the people who are like all these regulations are like for like health and safety like OSHA shit is like slowing down innovation. It's like, no dude, people would be like shooting at workers to make them move faster. Yes. It's against that. Yes. There's no OSHA rules in our recording studio and I regularly throw knives and bagels around

with the sling. Like it's terrible. That is true. It's terrible. Yeah. I should be in charge of the country. So yeah. This press release revealed that Highlands was not the only company accidentally dropping

Belladonna into its teething products. Another homeopathic medicine company, Raritan Pharmaceuticals, was forced to pull their products off the shelf when poison was found in them. So that's good. That's good. All right. Now, if you're a sane person, you might be wondering, why are homeopathic products regulated as drugs if they're at best water and at worst poison water?

That's a little odd, isn't it? Yeah. This all turns out to be thanks to a special law made just before World War II. Here's Forbes. The 1938 law was the brainchild of a U.S. senator, Royal Copeland, who happened to be a homeopath. Senator Copeland inserted language into a major food and drug law that declared homeopathic preparations to be drugs. It also allowed homeopaths themselves to maintain the official list of all these drugs, called

the homeopathic pharmacopia. Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse. Thanks to aggressive lobbying by homeopaths, homeopathic ingredients are not subject to the normal review required of real drugs. Most importantly, homeopathic drug makers do not have to prove their products are effective. Cool. That's a... I'm glad that that's just democracy knocking it out of the park again.

Senator, who's a homeopath says that we should treat them as drugs except for when we have to prove they work? Yeah. That's it. People have an issue with that? Oh, man. One of the fun products that homeopaths get to market as medicine without proving any therapeutic benefit for it is Topersen.

Topersen is generally marketed as a natural pain relief cream. You can buy it as a cream or a spray or in a special formulation for fibromyalgia. For $14.99, you can also buy Topersen for children in a 1.5 ounce tube. The seller of that particular product, Valley Medical Supplies, says that it helps with aches and pains, cuts and bruises, heel and knee pain, and growing pains. The section on information for parents and consumer states, Topersen Jr. uses no volatile oils such as camphor or menthol or irritating chemicals. Rather, it stimulates the body's desire to heal the damage that is causing the pain by

draining the toxins that build up in an injured area. There we go. I knew toxins. Yeah, Ty. They're in play. Yeah, that was destined. I was waiting. I was like, they're going to say toxins.

I like this theory that this thing activates your body. There's some substance out there that's like, your body's just like, what? Yeah, I didn't know to heal until the cream got on there. Oh, thanks. Oh, man. I love that we're again using our dumb Southern accents to make fun of these people when they're all based in Los Angeles. I just imagine them having us.

Well, yeah, we could just be like, here's what we should do. Here's what we should do, guys. Here's what I'll do. Fix it. Bro. Yeah, that's what it that is. I don't like this. I'm totally uncomfortable.

I feel like somebody named Chad just walked in. It's okay. It's okay. You just got, here's the problem with your baby, bro. There's not enough belladonna in it. You got to get, okay. They call it deadly nightshade, but you know, like when you say sick and you mean something's good, that's the kind of deadly it is, bro.

Bingo. Bingo. It's sick medicine. It's sick medicine. That's our new homeopathic supply cup. Sick medicine, bro. Then nothing we do is a lie. Oh, God, that just destroyed my soul.

I think we could get out of the park, I think we could be millionaire sick medicine. I mean, I think in another four years of American products, one of us at least could be the new secretary of health and human services. Yes. Yeah. Definitely. Anderson. Anderson.

Well, Anderson would honestly be an improvement. Anderson will be the president and we'll take all the fucking shit when it comes our way. Oh yeah. Yeah. I think it's impeached for letting a Russian dog dig in the yard or something. I don't know. I don't know what dog. When they come after us.

Presidential crime to be. Anderson. President Anderson. Now, Billy Wayne, I bet you're wondering, what might the supposedly deluded homeopathic ingredients of this Topersen miracle pain cream be? I mean, I'm sure it's something great. It's Belladonna. Now, now, Billy, it's not just Belladonna, of course.

They mix in just a, just a scoche of heloderma. You know what heloderma is? It's Hela monster venom. Okay. That seems good for pain. What? What? What, just acid tripping psychopath is just mixing shit.

Well, he tested it on his kids. It was fine. So put it in the pills or the cream or whatever. I feel like they sell this product at like Whole Foods. Oh, they sell it all. Yeah. Of course they sell it. I'm sure it's available at CBS and LA.

Yeah. Now, I wonder if this miracle product made of deadly nightshade and literal monster poison has a history of poisoning people. And it just so happens, I found a 2018 paper posted on the National Institutes of Health website. Anti-cholinergic toxicity secondary to overdose of Topersen cream, a homeopathic medication. I'm going to quote from that now. A 40 year old man presented with family to the emergency department complaining of headache

and blurry vision of one day's duration. His wife also noticed a change in mentation for two hours prior to presentation when he repeatedly asked the same questions and did not recognize family members. His past medical history included hypertension and something. His daily medications were pravastatin, metafloral, enamel prin, and non-steroidal anti-inflammatories for musculoskeletal pains. Social history and family history were non-contributory. Two days prior to presentation, he had developed a severe pain in his left foot which he treated

with the over-the-counter Topersen topical pain relief cream. He applied the cream liberally without respecting the recommended dosage. The exact quantity and frequency were unknown. No, that's like every dude. Well if this says like, take two, I'll take four because I'm awesome. But normally your pain relief cream is like going to be lidocaine or something like that. We're like, yeah, you put too much lidocaine on your foot. It's whatever.

If you're an adult, it's whatever. But he was putting too much Hila monster venom and Belladonna on his foot and that turns out to not be great. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I like the Hila monster about me like four or five times. Is that good? You're really cutting out the middle man.

I just, I gotta turn my ankle. I've been saying for years, Billy, you were ahead of the pack by keeping that Hila monster in your house just free and loose. Really has helped a lot. I've only been in the hospital like four or five times. He's cool. And I'd like to announce my new product, just a Hila monster we shipped to your house in a box.

Teething, good for foot pain, $1,000, no address. I will make sure a Hila monster finds you. The no address stamped envelope in the $1,000. There will just be a large poisonous lizard in your house at some point and you'll know that you're safe. Sick medicine was here. You know, it's weird with all these debates between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and the like about like, should we have Medicare for all?

Should we have some sort of like hybrid plan? Why not just Hila monsters? Just Hila monsters and machetes all over the place. A Hila monster in every house and a machete at every hand. That's my presidential platform. I think the country would get along a little better. I think we would solve, we would have other problems than the partisan divide currently shipping.

Yeah, that we didn't foresee. I do think there would be some stuff pop up that I didn't see that one coming. You know what? We didn't think this through. We got to stay active. That's true. Stay on your toes with a Hila monster in the house. You drink a lot of water.

Now the good news is that this guy who overdosed on Toperson did survive, but his symptoms were at one point serious enough that his doctors coded him for having a stroke. So maybe, maybe stay away from Toperson. He spent some time disoriented and pissing himself in a hospital before the administration of IV drugs was able to return him to baseline. A suspected cause of his symptoms was Belladonna poisoning. So we've been making fun of the Hila monster thing, but they suspect it was actually just telling us.

Belladonna. Yeah. They said, no, the Hila monster venom was actually all right. Thank God that was in there. Thank God that was in there. Really counteracted the Belladonna. He looks his wife. I feel like, see, Amara, I'm pretty smart.

I'm still smart. You mix enough of the poisons in there. More is more. I will say that he and his family were lucky that he took the Toperson and not, for instance, their infant child for obvious reasons. In 2017, a seven-year-old Italian girl caught an ear infection. Her parents took her to a doctor who prescribed antibiotics, but they decided to consult a second opinion and went with a homeopath instead.

Said ear infection spread to the girl's brain, killing her. Yes. Yep. Yeah. That's what happens. The parents were convicted of aggravated manslaughter and given three month sentences in prison. They attempted to justify their decision by citing that they were not anti-medicine in general, just concerned about antibiotics, which is a wrinkle that makes this case frustrating.

See, the over-prescription of antibiotics is one of the largest problems in modern medicine. Over 30% of antibiotic prescriptions in the United States, at least, are believed to be unnecessary. This manifests in a few different ways. Antibiotics are often prescribed to people who don't need them due to mistakes in diagnosis or a variety of other reasons, some of which boil down to medical laziness. They're also prescribed in doses that far exceed what the patient actually needs, which can cause long-term health issues in patients like die-offs and gut bacteria or whatever.

All of these very real examples of problems with antibiotic use mean that half-informed consumers like these Italian parents wind up with an understanding that there's something vaguely problematic about how antibiotics are used in modern medicine, but not really understanding why. So when they go to a homeopath who has already established a big part of the practice, they'll spend a lot more time talking with you. And doctors are very busy. They're usually very often bad at talking to patients.

Good bedside manners are very rare in medicine, in my experience, and in I think a lot of people's experience. So this doctor sits down and talks with them and tells them, no, you don't need antibiotics. Here's another way. And they know antibiotics are vaguely problematic, so they go with the other way. Then their doctor's ear infection goes out of control, and she dies of meningitis. Yeah, it's fucked. It's super fucked up.

It's this fucking vaccine shit, too, that same just a shadow of a doubt in smart people sometimes are like, well, because of one time. Do I have the machete? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just... We need more handsome doctors to have YouTube shows, but not to sell Dr. Oz bullshit. Yes, to actually tell them what works and what doesn't. We need, I'm calling on you, medical community, find us sexier doctors than Dr. Oz to confront

Dr. Oz. Yes. It's like, like Keir's like, to stop the danger of sexy nonsense doctors, we need sexy good doctors. Yes. It's the only thing that can save us. Their show is just called No, No. And other doctors out there right now, maybe do more crunches.

Maybe do more crunches. You know what, though, I do, one of my favorite things is to drive by a hospital and see at a doctor outside Spokane, that's my favorite fucking thing. You got to make a choice. I mean, I get that there's a stress relief, I understand, but it always makes me laugh or like, someone's writing a fucking drama about him right now. I saw a book on the shelf of one of my very close friends' grandfather that I love the title of and I have not read yet, but I know from the title that it's full of good medicine.

Live long and die fast, which I do think is a good goal. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. That's the goal. You want to live to 90 and then drop dead instantly. I want to live to 90 and then get shot by a sniper that I don't even know. That's actually the best. And that, Billy Wayne, brings me on to my next grift for this episode.

Snipe Edison. Ooh, yes. The only medicine that's just a man with a scoped rifle. Can we sell that, Sophie? It's a new euthanasia. So this is all terrible, but when it comes to infuriating stories of actual malpractice by homeopathic physicians, nothing I have come across beats the case of Penelope Dingle. And because this is a tragic story, I'm going to ask none of us to laugh at that last name.

They're Australian. They can't help it. It's not their fault. It's not their fault. It's like Walla Walla. Sorry. It was there. It's there.

In February 2003, Penelope was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Her husband was a prominent toxicologist in Perth and the specific form of cancer she was diagnosed with was believed to be extremely treatable. And Ms. Dingle did not opt for that treatment. She had a homeopathic doctor she trusted, Ms. Grayon. And Ms. Grayon told her that she could much more safely deal- Ms. Her name was Ms. That's the most, it's better than doctor.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, Ms. Grayon told her that she could hand much more safely deal with her rectal cancer via a course of homeopathic and natural remedies. Dr. Dingle claims he went along with his wife's wishes because he wasn't able to convince her that traditional medical treatment would be more effective than Ms. Grayon's homeopathic medicine. He later said, Pin had her mindset and it wasn't changeable.

You argue with her. Yeah. It's actually what he said. Yeah. I mean, he tried. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. There's also some suggestions that maybe he was cut up and trying to like write a health

book with them. It's a complicated story. I don't really know exactly. But for months, Penelope and Ms. Grayon had weekly appointments. But oddly enough, Penelope's cancer continued to get worse and worse. Sadly, this did not convince Penelope that something might be wrong. There's evidence that she and Ms. Grayon even convinced her husband to help them write a book about treating cancer naturally once she was cured.

Dr. Dingell later said, Pin was in awe of Francine, Francine's grayon. And I felt that Pin would have perhaps left me if I had criticized Francine. He claims that she was unwilling to listen to any medical advice that did not come from her homeopath. Pin repeatedly told me that Francine was convinced she could cure cancer. Near the end of 2003, Penelope Dingell's condition took a sharp turn for the worst and she underwent emergency surgery to remove a bowel obstruction and save her life. Penelope remained confident in Francine's grayon after this point, up until a phone call in

which her homeopath asked her to sign a letter freeing her from all future legal liability if Penelope died. Wow. Yeah. Like a great physician. Just like a true grifter. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, at this point, Penelope started to question whether or not she made the right decision. Oh, well, just a minute. Now, wait a second. Yeah. Eventually, she realized that she'd been had by a con woman and wrote Francine's grayon a furious and a heartbreaking letter. In it, she excoriated the homeopath for, among other things, ordering her to eschew any pain

medication in favor of homeopathic pain treatments that did not work. Quote, you told me many stories about your husband and his overreaction to pain. As I was also in Aries, you advised me that like him, I overreacted to pain. You gave me a $5 note with the word phantom written on it. You told me that my pain was a phantom product of my imagination. You described your own experience with sciatica and informed me that until I had experienced the sort of pain you'd had then, I would not know what real pain was. The majority of my pain you informed me was in my own mind.

You saw me sobbing with pain during our contacts. One night after my bowel obstructed, I called because I could not stand the agony and your professional advice was, go take a bath. I endured over 120 hours of agony before I went against your advisement, used morphine and got myself to a hospital in an ambulance. During the months you treated me, the hot water bottles you encouraged me to use as my main method of pain control burned my skin and ruptured my blood vessels. But my pain was so severe, it felt like relief.

My entire coccyx area is blue and purple. That's cool, huh? What a... God. Yeah. It's a nightmare. And her husband was a fucking doctor? Her husband was a doctor.

Yeah. Yo, dude, you're trash, bro. I don't think it's... Sometimes you can't... He may have been trash. But also maybe that just sometimes you can't convince people when they get really roped in by... It's like a religious thing.

Like, that's a part of this. Like, she believed in this woman. She believed this woman. I... Yeah. And then... Yeah. That's what...

I don't think the guy's bad. It sounds like the whole time. He's like... I mean, especially like, your wife is dying of cancer and she's like, well, this woman makes me feel better, so there's a part of you that's like, okay, whatever we can do at this point. Fuck. And now he's probably like, well, I'm going to kill that lady is what I'm going to do.

What happened to Penelope? Penelope Dingle died from complications due to colorectal cancer in 2005. It is believed... It got too worse. Yeah. It's believed she would have survived if she'd undertaken conventional treatment after diagnosis. The whole case was rather famous in Australia and resulted in a sizable coroner's inquest.

But oddly enough, Francine Scrayon faced no long-term punishment as a result of her actions. As best I can tell, she's still a practicing homeopath. Because all she did was say, don't, which is not illegal. Nope. You're just giving someone bad advice, which isn't illegal. Thank God we're all being jailed. Yeah, we would all be in jail. But hers is...

...seem evil. ...for trying to sell snipe Edison. Yes. God. Now, Billy Wayne, after an infuriating tale like that of unspeakable tragedy, there's nothing that I like more than machete tennis. Yeah, I think it's... If you need to cure your tennis elbow, because like cures like, and since this is like tennis,

it will fix your tennis elbow. We're gonna be healed. We're gonna be healed. Is there... Before we do this, is there any belladonna in this? Oh, shitloads. Okay. I fucking doused everything in this room in belladonna.

I think we got to do that. Oh, yeah. And there's a Gila monster loose in here somewhere, too. I think we're... All right, gentlemen. Take your positions. All right, we've got our now rather battered VHS tape of the Michael Douglas Paul Verhoeven classic basic instinct.

I stabbed it pretty hard. Actually, you should serve this time. Okay. I serve one. I've been doing this one. I'm gonna go with this. Yeah. Try an overhand.

Yeah, that seems good. Damn. God, that felt good. Here's to our first actual... our first actual hit. That was cool. Yeah. And the dust came out. And the dust came out.

That was really cool. That's belladonna right there. Yeah. High grade belladonna. Here we go. Here we go. Oh, I almost had a ball. Kind of.

Yeah. I almost had a ball. That was definitely our closest to... oh boy, this tape has seen better days. It's even worse. I'm gonna try and do it from the side this time. Oh, see, it doesn't have enough frontage area when you do it that way. It's okay. Oh, that was... oh, we lost the case.

Now there's shattered plastic all over the room for some mysterious reason. Excuse me, kid. All right, Billy. You okay, Anderson? If you don't want your eyes, there's a pink corvette down there, of course, because just to remind us that we're on Hollywood. Yep. Oh.

Well, Billy. Is that it? No, let's do one more. Do one more. Because I think this one's really gonna break apart when we get a shuddy head. I think we got more hide on this one. Yeah, that's a good idea. Yep.

Yep. Yep. I've lived enough lives to know what... Just a reminder, everything we've done is approved by OSHA. Yeah, I signed it. Yep. No dogs were harmed in the making of this podcast. Nope.

There's a lot of plastic shrapnel in the room, though. Someone's gonna have to... Yeah, yeah, stick that up on the soundboard, Billy. That'll be fine. That'll make Dan'll happy. When he comes in here in another day or two. Well, this has been Behind the Bastards. You can find me at bwdtour.com.

That's got all my live dates, or just Google Billy Wayne Davis and all my Twitter and Instagram comes up, too. And again, you grab yourself an envelope. You put between $500 and $1,000 in it. Cash. Cash. You write either or both of our names in the names of this podcast on it, and at some point in the next year, there will be a hila monster, a machete, or a baby's machete in your house, depending on what you write on the front.

Inside your house. Not like outside on the porch. Oh, no. No. Inside your house. We deliver it inside your house. That's the kind of... And again, all of these products are FDA guaranteed to cure earaches, teaving, colorectal cancer,

works on all of it. Every problem. FDA... You get problems with the FDA? It'll solve that, too. As the school of machetism states, knife cures knife, and if a machete won't fix it, a hila monster will. That's true.

That's true. That's science. So check out Billy Wayne Davis' website. Check him out on tour. And find our website, BehindTheBastards.com. Find us on Twitter and Instagram and at BastardsPod. Find me on Twitter, at IWriteOK. And find a machete, wherever sporting goods or weird copper bracelets that cure your arthritis

are sold. That's true. That's very true. That's the episode. That's the episode. Product! Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of goods. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

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Thanks for watching.