Magic Potions in the Twenty-First Century:
Rashid Buttar and the Lure of Personality
Me and Shrek took some magic potion, and now we’re sexy!
—The Donkey, Shrek 2
My father was the head of a sales force that sold men’s shirts. Every six months, salesmen from across the country would meet in Baltimore and my father would teach them how to sell. His message was clear: salesmen weren’t selling shirts; they were selling themselves.
Even though I was just a little boy, my father let me go to those meetings. (I went for the food.) But I still remember the names of most of those salesmen. I really loved those guys. They were funny and affable and kind. And even though I knew that their stories were exaggerated or fabricated, it didn’t matter. I enjoyed being around them.
My other childhood memory of the lovable huckster came in the form of a Twilight Zone episode that aired in October of 1959. Titled “One for the Angels,” it featured two veteran actors: Ed Wynn, the rubber-faced comic who starred as the Toymaker in Babes in Toyland and Mr. Dussell in The Diary of Anne Frank, and Murray Hamilton, best known as the mayor of Amity in the 1975 movie Jaws.
The episode opens with Wynn standing behind a suitcase propped on a wooden stand. “Right here, ladies and gentlemen,” he shouts. “Special July clean-up sale!” Rod Serling, host of The Twilight Zone, sets the scene: “Man on the sidewalk named Lou Bookman. Age: sixtyish. Occupation: pitchman.”
Bookman slowly closes his suitcase, folds up the stand, and returns to his stoop, where he is immediately mobbed by several children. “What are you selling today, Lou? Toys?” asks one, an eight-year-old named Maggie. Bookman, who loves children, gives a wind-up robot to each of them.
When Bookman returns to his apartment, he finds Murray Hamilton sitting on a chair, thumbing through a small notepad. Hamilton is the angel of death. After confirming Bookman’s age, birthplace, employment history, and parents’ names, he says, “Your departure is at midnight.” “My departure?” asks Bookman, horrified. To remove any doubt about his intentions, the angel touches a flower, which wilts and dies.
Bookman pleads for his life. “But I have some unfinished business,” he says. “Between you and me, I’ve never made a truly big pitch, enough for the skies to open up. You know, a pitch for the angels.” The angel relents, allowing Bookman one last pitch. But Bookman has no intention of keeping his promise. When the angel realizes that Bookman has conned him, he selects an alternate.
On the street in front of Bookman’s apartment, the sound of screeching tires is followed by screams. Maggie, unconscious, is lying on the ground. Seeing the consequences of his actions, Bookman recants. “Take me!” he pleads. “She’s just a little girl. She’s only eight years old.” But it’s too late. The angel of death tells Bookman he’ll be back at midnight to claim her.
Fifteen minutes before midnight, the angel arrives at the stoop of Maggie’s apartment. Bookman, who has been waiting for him, opens his suitcase and takes out an ugly cotton tie. “Take this lovely tie here, for instance,” he says. “What does this look like to you?” “It looks like a tie,” the angel deadpans. “Ladies and gentlemen,” expounds Bookman. “If you will feast your eyes on probably the most exciting invention since atomic energy. A simulated silk so fabulously conceived as to mystify even the ancient Chinese silk manufacturers—an almost unbelievable attention to detail. A piquant intervening of gossamer softness.” Riveted, the angel buys the tie.
Next, Bookman holds up an ordinary spool of thread. “This fantastic thread is not available in stores,” he says. “It is smuggled in by Oriental birds specially trained for ocean travel, each carrying a tiny thread in a small satchel underneath their ruby throats. It takes 832 crossings to supply enough thread to go around one spool.” The angel can’t reach for his wallet fast enough. “I’ll take all you have,” he says.
Bookman continues: “Sewing needles, marvelous plastic shoelaces, genuine static eradicator, suntan oil, eczema powder, razors, athlete’s foot destroyer. How about some simulated cashmere socks?” The angel is sweating, obsessed: “All right, all right. I’ll take it all!”
The clock strikes midnight—too late for the angel to claim Maggie. The angel realizes he’s been had. “One minute past twelve, Mr. Bookman,” he says. “And you made me miss my appointment.” “Yes,” replies Bookman. “It was quite a pitch—very effective. The best I’ve ever done. A pitch so big, the sky would open up.”
Serling in voice-over: “Louis J. Bookman. Age: sixtyish. Occupation: pitchman. Formerly a fixture of the summer. Formerly a rather minor component to a hot July. But throughout his life, a man beloved by children. And, therefore, a most important man. Couldn’t happen, you say? Probably not in most places. But it did happen—in the Twilight Zone.”
When Louis Bookman was at the height of his sales pitch—knowing he had to distract the angel of death if Maggie were to survive—he talked in a rapid-fire, high-pitched, nasal voice, like a duck. In the sixteenth century, the Dutch had a name for this: kwakzalver, meaning one who quacks like a duck while promoting salves and ointments. This became the English word quacksalver, later shortened to quack, meaning anyone who proffers false cures. For some, the term also implies intent—that quacks are knowingly fraudulent in their pursuit of fortune. But this isn’t always the case.
In many ways, Bookman was a classic quack. He was an impassioned salesman who clearly loved children and wanted to protect them. He was convincing, in large part, because he was convinced. When Bookman claimed that 832 Oriental birds were required to make one spool of thread, he believed—at least for the moment—in what he was saying, even though it was pure fantasy. And his cures for eczema and athlete’s foot were offered well before treatments like topical steroids and antifungal creams were widely available. Bookman’s false promises weren’t unusual. In the 1800s, quacks offered Dill’s Diabetic Mixture before the discovery of insulin; Peebles’ Epilepsy Treatment before anti-seizure drugs; Dr. Shoop’s Diphtheria Remedy before diphtheria antiserum; Detchon’s Rheumatism Cure before anti-inflammatory drugs; Az-Ma-Syde before bronchodilators; William Radam’s Microbe Killer before antibiotics; and Cancerine before chemotherapy.
Quacks offered potions that made you smarter (Harper’s Brain Food), younger (Blush of Youth), less anxious (Dr. Kline’s Great Nerve Restorer), more successful (Wendell’s Ambition Pills), less freckled (Dr. Berry’s Freckle Ointment), more potent (Las-I-Go for Superb Manhood), and more fertile (Becket’s Sovereign Restorative Drops for Barrenness). Patent medicines had such wonderful, colorful names, you couldn’t help but buy them: medicines like Admirable Essence of Life, Squire’s Grand Elixir, Hamlin’s Wizard Oil, and Kickapoo Indian Sagwa (satirized in the cartoon Li’l Abner as Kickapoo Joy Juice). And it wasn’t only the public that believed these claims; celebrities did, too. Devices like the Radio X pad made Al Jolson a better singer, and “nuxated” iron made Jack Dempsey a better fighter and Ty Cobb a better hitter. At least according to them.
We look back warmly on these salesmen and their funny medicines—a whimsical, bygone era made obsolete by the relentless advances of science. But there’s no need for nostalgia—hucksters and their wondrous elixirs haven’t gone anywhere. One works in a small town just outside Charlotte, North Carolina. In fact, people travel from all over the world to see him—and to buy the two magical potions he invented.
Rashid Buttar graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, majoring in biology and theology before attending the College of Osteopathic Medicine and Surgery, in Des Moines, Iowa, where he specialized in emergency medicine. He’s enormously popular, attracting patients from thirty-six states and forty-two countries.
Buttar has also written a book—The 9 Steps to Keep the Doctor Away—and produced a series of instructional videos such as Heavy Metal Toxicity: The Hidden Killer; Autism: The Misdiagnosis of Our Future Generations; and Cancer: The Untold Truth. Both as a writer and as a speaker, Buttar delivers his message passionately, clearly, and compellingly. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, US News & World Report, and the New York Times and appeared on ABC’s 20/20, PBS’s Frontline, and CBS’s World News Roundup. In May 2004, Buttar testified before a congressional committee investigating new treatments for autism.
Buttar’s message is simple: environmental toxins such as mercury and lead cause chronic illnesses, which should be treated with chelation medicines. (Chelation, from the Greek chele, meaning “claw,” binds heavy metals and rids them from the body.) Rashid Buttar knows what scares people. From Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring—warning of the dangers of DDT—to concerns about environmental toxins today, it’s easy to appeal to the notion that we’re poisoning ourselves. And the need to keep the body pure is centuries old, reflected in the text of every major religion. In 9 Steps, Buttar writes, “If it’s in the form God created, it’s good. If it’s not, leave it alone. God given = Good. Man-made = Madness.” To rid themselves of unseen toxins, hundreds of thousands of Americans receive chelation drugs every year, usually intravenously.
Although popular, the fear that man-made poisons are causing chronic illnesses is largely unfounded. Studies haven’t supported the concern that certain environmental contaminants such as dioxin, radon, bisphenol A, hexavalent chromium (the villain in Erin Brockovich), trichloroethylene (the basis of the book and movie A Civil Action), and even DDT cause the diseases claimed. And while chelation therapy is valuable, it’s not a panacea—it’s required only for people exposed to large quantities of heavy metals, such as lead paint in old houses or methylmercury in contaminated fish.
Rashid Buttar doesn’t see it that way. When patients come to him with cancer, he often chelates them. The same is true if they have arthritis, autism, diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, or hormonal problems. During a licensing hearing in April 2008, Dr. Art McCulloch, an anesthesiologist from Charlotte, asked Buttar’s nurse practitioner, Jane Garcia, whether it seemed odd that every single one of their patients had been poisoned by heavy metals:
MCCULLOCH: Does it seem unusual to you that 100 percent of the patients that come through your door would have one particular condition?
GARCIA: Well, when we look at what we are doing in our environment; what we are doing with toxic waste; what we are doing with pollutants—where is that going? It goes in our water supply. It goes in food we eat. And what do we do? We ingest that.
MCCULLOCH: So it does not seem unusual?
GARCIA: It doesn’t.
At the beginning of his career, Rashid Buttar didn’t treat many children. Then something happened. “In January of 1999, my son, Abie, was born,” said Buttar, fighting back tears. “At ten months old, he started to speak. He had a ten-, twelve-word vocabulary.” But at fourteen months of age, Abie regressed and could no longer speak. The first word he’d lost was the first word he’d learned: abu, meaning “father” in Arabic.
Buttar soon realized that his son had autism and that God was asking him to do something about it. “Looking back, it’s clear that God had a specific plan for me; but I was moving away from the right path,” recalled Buttar. “My name in Arabic means ‘one who stays on the right path of life.’ Now I realize that this experience was nothing more than God upping the ante, sending me a clear message: ‘You are going to do what you were meant to do, what you were created to do!’ ”
Buttar had seen his destiny. He would find a cure for autism. “I subsequently spent thousands of hours—many if not most of them late at night, sometimes all night—studying, researching, learning, crying, and praying that my son would be returned to me,” wrote Buttar. “I pleaded, begged, and threatened God. I bartered with the Creator, negotiating my arms and legs in exchange for the return of my son.”
Within a few years Buttar had developed a novel chelation therapy, one that didn’t have to be injected or ingested, as all FDA-approved drugs for the treatment of true heavy-metal poisoning require. Rather, Buttar’s chelation, called TD-DMPS (for transdermal dimercaptopropanesulfonic acid), could simply be rubbed onto the skin. The results, according to Buttar, were phenomenal. “Five months after I began his detoxification,” wrote Buttar, “Abie went from no language to a vocabulary of five hundred–plus words. [Today] he’s extraordinary—ahead of his peers in school in all subjects and two to three grade levels ahead in math and English, an incredible athlete in every sport he tries.”
By April 2006 Buttar had treated more than 250 autistic children with his wondrous anti-autism cream. To determine whether his medicine was working, he tested children’s urine, finding large quantities of mercury and lead. As toxins poured out, autistic children recovered, some dramatically. To many parents, Rashid Buttar was a hero, his drug a miracle. Unfortunately, Rashid Buttar, his therapies, and his diagnostic tests aren’t quite as advertised. His inconsistencies came to light in a story that swept the nation and went viral on YouTube. It involved an NFL cheerleader with a terrible problem.
On August 23, 2009, a twenty-five-year-old cheerleading ambassador for the Washington Redskins named Desiree Jennings got a flu shot. Two weeks later, she developed a bizarre series of symptoms. She couldn’t walk without flailing her arms and legs, and her speech was halting and robotic. Although Desiree couldn’t walk, she could run, competing in an eight-kilometer race. She could also walk sideways and backwards. She just couldn’t walk forward. Desiree claimed that if she listened to startling sounds like a telephone ringing or hip-hop or techno music, her symptoms worsened. However, if she listened to the English alternative rock band Coldplay, her symptoms improved. She also developed a British accent, even though she was born and raised in Ohio.
Desiree was taken to hospitals in Leesburg and Fairfax, Virginia, before ending up at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore. There, she was examined by internists, physical therapists, speech therapists, neurologists, neuropsychologists, and psychiatrists who subjected her to a dizzying array of blood tests, scans, and metabolic screenings. Despite extensive testing, no one could find anything wrong with her. Finally, a physical therapist offhandedly provided Desiree with the name of a disease she could embrace: dystonia, a movement disorder.
On October 13, 2009, WTTG-5, a Fox network affiliate in Washington, D.C., picked up the story. Three days later, Inside Edition jumped in, opening its segment with “She’s the beautiful cheerleader whose heartbreaking story is shocking the nation!” Footage from Inside Edition made it to YouTube. Soon hundreds of thousands of people had learned that the flu vaccine caused a horrible, disabling disease.
Anti-vaccine activists rushed to Desiree’s aid. Jenny McCarthy and then-boyfriend Jim Carrey, working with Generation Rescue—a group dedicated to the notion that a mercury-containing preservative in vaccines caused autism—directed Desiree to the popular physician in North Carolina who they knew could cure her. In November 2009, Buttar examined Desiree at his clinic. His diagnosis was predictable: “mercury toxicity” from the flu shot. Buttar began intravenous chelation. “We took the toxins out of her system,” declared Buttar, who confidently predicted that Desiree would fully recover. Within a few hours Desiree was feeling better. Amazing. So amazing that a film crew from ABC’s 20/20 traveled to North Carolina to document what had happened. Unfortunately, with the cameras rolling, Desiree regressed. No longer able to walk, she had to be taken out of Buttar’s clinic in a wheelchair.
Slowly, Desiree’s story fell apart. First it came to light that neurologists at Johns Hopkins had diagnosed Desiree’s problem as psychological. Later, other physicians weighed in. Yale neurologist Steven Novella wrote, “Jennings’ movements [and] evolving speech patterns do not fit any known pattern of neurological damage. Rather, they are all features of psychogenic symptoms. The one that is probably the easiest for people to understand is her vaguely British accent. . . . There are only so many ways that speech can be neurologically abnormal—none of them make you sound British.” Neurologists at the University of Maryland School of Medicine now use Desiree’s YouTube video to illustrate what psychological movement disorders look like.
When the producers of Inside Edition realized they’d been had, they did a follow-up story. On February 5, 2010, they caught up with Desiree outside a shopping mall. “When Jennings first walked out of a store and into the shopping-center parking lot,” said the correspondent, “she seemed to be walking normally. But as she left to get into her car [and saw our camera], she was walking sideways.”
In the name of helping Desiree Jennings, Rashid Buttar had ignored the real cause of her problem. Desiree needed psychological support, not chelation. “I remain sympathetic to Desiree Jennings,” wrote Novella. “She is an unfortunate woman who is being exploited by the media . . . and the anti-vaccine movement. What she needs is the delicate management of science-based practitioners who know how to deal with such cases.” Later, Desiree said, “If I have to go over to China and do experimental procedures, I’ll find a way to get [my life] back. It may take a while, but I will get everything back. I will find a way.”
Buttar believes that his chelation medicines work on people like Desiree Jennings because he detects heavy metals in the urine after treatment. Unfortunately, Buttar’s tests and conclusions are misleading, for several reasons.
First: Because metals like mercury and lead are present in the earth’s crust, everyone has small quantities in their bloodstream. These trace quantities aren’t harmful.
Second: Because everyone has small quantities of heavy metals in their bloodstream, virtually everyone who is given a chelating agent will excrete heavy metals in their urine.
Third: Reference ranges for heavy metals present in the urine after chelation don’t exist. So when Buttar claims that patients have too many heavy metals in their body, he’s groping in the dark. Indeed, a look at the fine print of a commonly used testing company states, “Reference ranges are representative of a healthy population under non-challenge or non-provoked conditions.” When Buttar described his miracle chelation treatments to a congressional subcommittee, congressmen nodded approvingly every time he showed mercury in the urine of autistic children. But the congressmen would have seen the same results had Buttar chelated them. Indeed, when researchers compared mercury excretion in children with or without autism, they found that autistic and normal children had the same amount of mercury in their bodies.
Fourth: Not only do Buttar’s chelation therapies not work, but it doesn’t make sense that they would. When a cell is damaged by a heavy metal such as mercury, it’s permanently damaged. When doctors treat patients with chelation who really are poisoned by mercury, they do it for one reason: to bind free mercury and rid the body of it before it can do more harm. This means that when Rashid Buttar treated Desiree Jennings with intravenous chelation, claiming an almost immediate reversal of symptoms, it couldn’t have been because of the chelation. Following the first reports of Desiree’s remarkable recovery, Steven Novella wrote, “Brain damage does not immediately reverse itself once the cause is removed. . . . Now Jennings herself, and Dr. Buttar, report that Jennings began to improve while still sitting in the chair and receiving chelation therapy, and within thirty-six hours her symptoms were completely gone. First, let me say that I am very happy Ms. Jennings’ symptoms have resolved. Hopefully now she can go on with her life. But to me, this impossibly rapid recovery is a dramatic confirmation that her symptoms were psychogenic to begin with.”
In 2009, when Rashid Buttar was asked whether he had tested his anti-autism cream to prove it worked, he responded, “No, we haven’t done that. Why would I waste my time proving something that I already know works innately?”
By choosing not to test his miracle cure for autism, Rashid Buttar carries on the grand tradition of medical hucksters throughout the centuries. The claim is always the same: It works because I know it works. It works because my patients say it works. “This little bottle is the only thing that has been shown to conclusively get these kids better,” says Buttar. Think about this for a moment. You’ve just invented the only medicine that you believe cures autism, a disorder that affects as many as one in eighty-eight American children. Wouldn’t you be the first in line to prove that it works? To prove that it should be on the medicine shelf of every child with this disorder? When Edward Jenner thought that an injection of cowpox could prevent smallpox, he couldn’t wait to test it. In 1796, Jenner proved that his vaccine worked; soon, it was used throughout the world. When Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolated insulin in 1921, they rushed to children’s bedsides to prove that it worked; now insulin is standard therapy for people with diabetes, allowing sufferers to live longer. And when Howard Florey and Ernest Chain isolated, purified, and mass-produced penicillin in the early 1940s, they immediately tested it in victims of a Boston nightclub fire. So why is Rashid Buttar hesitant to test a medicine that he “knows” is the only effective treatment for autism? Probably because, once it was studied, he would have to admit that his claims are fanciful.
Desiree 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.”
Rashid 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.
Buttar’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. 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 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.”
There’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.
When the United States faced a crisis in 2009, Rashid Buttar was among the first to give potentially deadly advice. “The facts are the facts,” he said. “Right now more people have died from the swine flu vaccine than have died from swine flu. Probably more people will die from the swine flu vaccine than will ever die from swine flu itself. The viral strain has lost its virulence as it has come through the Yucatan Peninsula through Mexico and into the United States. So really the big hype that they made is all smoke and mirrors. It’s all an illusion to scare people.” Buttar was right in claiming that swine flu virus had worked its way up from Mexico, entering the United States in April 2009. But he was wrong that the virus had lost its virulence. During the few months following his pronouncements, an estimated 47 million Americans were infected with swine flu, 250,000 were hospitalized, and 12,000 died. Among the dead were an estimated 1,100 children—ten times more than die during a typical influenza season. Buttar’s advice wasn’t just wrong, it was spectacularly wrong. And anyone who listened to it faced an unnecessary risk.
Not all of Rashid Buttar’s patients are satisfied with his care. In April 2008, the North Carolina Medical Board heard their complaints. The board’s lawyer, Marcus Jimison, introduced his case. “The evidence will show that Dr. Buttar preys on people in their darkest hours, at a time when they are most desperate. He provides therapies to dying patients that have not been shown to be effective and charges them thousands of dollars a day for what he knows will not work. And he does this with a North Carolina medical license hanging on his wall.”
Jimison summarized the allegations against Buttar.
• Buttar treated a patient with cervical cancer with intravenous hydrogen peroxide, an unproven and potentially dangerous therapy. For the initial visit, Buttar charged $12,000. During the next month, the patient received nineteen more injections, at a cost of $1,000 each, for a total of $31,000. When the patient died, Buttar’s office sent the family a refund of $2,500.
• Buttar treated a patient with ovarian cancer with intravenous vitamins, chelation, Philbert Infra Respiratory Reflex Procedure, and Ondamed biofeedback. The bill for two months of treatments was $30,000. Prior to her death, the patient paid Buttar $10,000. When her estate failed to pay the remaining $20,000, Buttar turned the matter over to a collection agency.
• Buttar charged a patient with cancer of the adrenal gland $32,000 for ineffective therapies. The patient’s wife remembered their first meeting with Buttar: “He said it didn’t matter what kind of cancer anybody had,” she recalled. “He could cure it. He kept reiterating he had a 100 percent success rate.” After her husband died, his wife canceled a check to Buttar for $6,700. Buttar turned the matter over to a collection agency, seeking the unpaid portion of the bill, interest, and a 25 percent collection fee.
• In October 2007, Buttar told a patient with colon cancer that he “would be an idiot for doing anything the conventional doctors told him to do.” Buttar advised chelation and ozone therapy, at a cost of $5,000 a week. Two months later, the patient was dead.
Toward the end of the hearing, Jimison asked Buttar whether his therapies were below the standard of care. “It’s not the standard of care,” he said. “It’s beyond the standard of care.”
Jimison closed by exhorting the medical board to do what was right—to suspend the license of a man who was doing harm, at the very least by diverting patients away from potentially helpful therapies. “Somewhere there is a loved one that’s going to Dr. Buttar’s office,” he said. “They’re dying, and would be looking for any glimmer of hope. And Dr. Buttar is more than willing to give them that glimmer of hope. This is the time to stand up for science-based, evidence-based medicine. . . . It will be the board’s finest hour.”
It wasn’t to be. The board chose only to order Buttar to provide a consent form advising his patients that his treatments hadn’t been proven effective and hadn’t been licensed by the FDA. He could continue to treat patients with cancer and autism. Continue to treat them as if they had been poisoned by heavy metals, even though evidence refuted his claim. Continue to sell magical anti-autism creams and anti-aging medicines without any proof that they worked. Buttar still describes treatments on his website as “highly effective” and boasts of giving 500,000 chelation treatments without any side effects (which is highly unlikely). It would be surprising if the revised consent deterred desperate patients and parents from streaming to his door.