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Transcript:
Back in January, I talked a little bit about my experience visiting the UK headquarters of the Church of Scientology, and here’s what I said:
“I’ve been on this beat longer than you might realize. More than a decade ago, I had the opportunity to accompany my pal, writer Jon Ronson, to Scientology’s annual gala at their British headquarters in West Sussex, where they presented an award to some quack who thought they had discovered the cure for autism or something. It was weird. I gave them a fake name, just in case.”
When I filmed that, I couldn’t quite remember what the quack’s cure was. But just a few days later, I was reminded of it in the worst possible way: when a 5-year old boy was tragically killed by that very cure.
Let me start by describing a key aspect of Scientology’s teachings: they not only do not believe in psychiatry, but they think that psychiatrists are actively evil. This is likely related to the fact that the cult’s founder, L. Ron. Hubbard, was absolutely batshit, and so accordingly, psychiatrists recommended to his wife that he be institutionalized. The following year, he launched his new anti-psychiatry cult. Obviously, the field of psychiatry is relatively young and has some nasty stories in its recent history, so it wasn’t too difficult for Hubbard to convince adherents to reject the entire science.
Of course, mental disorders continue to exist whether you believe in psychiatric treatment or not, so Scientologists invented and popularized “alternatives,” like vitamins that do absolutely nothing to treat disorders as serious as schizophrenia. One famous case is Lisa McPherson, a 36-year old Scientologist who was hospitalized after she took off all her clothes in the middle of a street following a minor car accident. Her fellow cult members removed her from the hospital to prevent her from seeing a psychiatrist, and instead locked her away against her will, giving her supplements and sedatives to treat her apparent psychosis. 17 days later, they dumped her at a hospital, dead from an apparent embolism.
So the Scientologists are always on the lookout for a new quack treatment, and about 15 years ago they found a new one, which I got to see live on stage: a hyperbaric chamber.
Hyperbaric chambers are sealed rooms that allow for the air pressure inside to be controlled, so you can set it to the pressure you’d experience at sea level, or 50 meters underwater, or whatever you need. They were originally developed to help SCUBA divers–if you dive past a certain depth, you can’t just zoom back up to the surface or you risk forming gas bubbles in your body that can cause a number of horrible symptoms or even death, in what’s known as “decompression sickness” or “the bends.” A diver who experiences this can be saved by shoving them into a hyperbaric chamber, where they can go back to the pressure they were at at their deepest point underwater, breathe in mostly pure oxygen, and then slowly acclimate to the pressure at sea level.
As a SCUBA diver, I find this entire discussion extremely icky so I would like to move on now.
Over the years, researchers have found that hyperbaric chambers can help with several disorders, like certain eye and ear issues, wounds that won’t heal, and carbon monoxide poisoning. Unfortunately, in backwater countries like the United States, hyperbaric chambers haven’t been well regulated, which allowed snake oil salesmen to sell them as a magic cure-all to treat anything. And I really mean they sell them, in every way it’s possible to sell them: you can visit a day spa and buy a hyperbaric treatment for your lipedema, or if you have about $5,000 you can just buy your own hyperbaric chamber to leave in the garage and use it whenever you want.
There are a few problems with this lack of regulation. For a start, there’s the same problem we see with every quack “alternative” treatment, which is that some people will forgo real treatments for real illnesses to do this, which will do nothing. Unethical hyperbaric peddlers claim that it can cure everything from cancer to HIV/AIDS, meaning that it’s inevitable they’ll convince someone to skip their chemo or their antiretrovirals.
These con artists also are taking money from people who can’t necessarily afford it. It’s not like they’re on an insurance plan.
Finally, there are possible negative side effects to hyperbaric chambers, like the development of cataracts, or oxygen toxicity due to the administration of pure oxygen that’s supposed to include breaks.
And that brings me to the ultimate negative side effect: immolation. It’s extremely rare, but the administration of pure oxygen under pressure by someone with no training occasionally results in catastrophic explosions, which is what happened recently to remind me of this bullshit.
On January 31st of this year, a five-year old boy named Thomas Cooper was undergoing treatment in a hyperbaric chamber at a “medical facility” outside of Detroit, Michigan when a spark ignited the room, incinerating the child and leaving his mother with extensive scarring as she tried and failed to pull her son from the chamber.
This would be a tragedy even if Thomas was undergoing treatment for a known condition that hyperbaric therapy treats, but he was there for ADHD and SLEEP APNEA, disorders that are easily treated with medication and a CPAP. The facility, called The Oxford Center, still to this day lists dozens of disorders they treated, and it’s truly an astonishing list: anal fissures, cancer, cerebral palsy, dementia, diabetes, epilepsy, fetal alcohol syndrome, heart attack, lyme disease, pancreatitis, parkinson’s, renal failure, spider bite, and of course, autism.
There’s no evidence that hyperbaric therapy treats any of those conditions, but I’ll just focus on autism, because there have been a few studies on it. Some of them have even found that it was effective, most notably studies led by Dr. Dan Rossignol, like this one in 2009 that found “Children with autism who received hyperbaric treatment at 1.3 atm and 24% oxygen for 40 hourly sessions had significant improvements in overall functioning, receptive language, social interaction, eye contact, and sensory/cognitive awareness compared to children who received slightly pressurized room air.”
Unfortunately, Rossignol failed to institute proper controls. Among a multitude of problems, the results were based on subjective reports from the children’s parents, and the scale they used to measure the outcomes was only given to the kids after treatment, as opposed to giving it beforehand as well to make sure the kids in the treatment group were the same as those in the control group. The sloppiness of the study is odd until you realize that Rossignol RUNS HIS OWN HYPERBARIC TREATMENT CENTER FOR CHILDREN WITH AUTISM. Weird little conflict of interest, there.
To date, no proper study has shown any evidence that hyperbaric therapy does anything for autistic kids or adults.
There are a few more infuriating details to this story: first of all, there IS an accreditation program for businesses that want to offer hyperbaric treatment, through the Undersea & Hyperbaric Medical Society, but there are only a few in each state because, you know, it costs money to get accredited and con artists don’t want to pay if they don’t have to. Only two of 42 such facilities in Michigan have that accreditation. Instead of requiring this, the FDA simply puts the onus on the customer–excuse me, the patient–to know and to seek out an accredited facility.
Additionally, Michigan’s Attorney General has stated that “Michigan law doesn’t require any oversight over the use of hyperbaric chambers.” According to USA Today, “Nessel said her office doesn’t have the authority to inspect all the facilities that provide hyperbaric oxygen therapy in the state to ensure they are safely in operation. Nessel can only inspect when there is enough probable cause “that there are crimes being committed involving hyperbaric chambers.”
Hey guys, here’s an idea: let’s make it a crime to stuff five-year olds into hyperbaric chambers to cure sleep apnea. And then let’s look at the publicly available websites for these quack treatment centers and see them ADMITTING IT, and then inspect them to confirm that, and then put them in prison BEFORE they kill a kid. Just a thought!
