grow a brain (too late for some)
and don't get on the scare bandwagon.
follow the money.
Do your own research, be skeptical
The last case I will mention is of an adult. I was referred to a web site called "The Mercury Connection" to show me the horrors of amalgam fillings. It certainly horrified me, but not for the reasons that the person recommending it to me thought. What horrified me was the report, in his own words, of a man with an incurable disease who had the last years of his life stolen from him by quacks and liars. Roy Smith had Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, also called "Lou Gehrig's Disease"), a quite rare complaint. He was deceived into thinking that this may have been caused by the mercury in the fillings in his teeth, so he had all his fillings removed and replaced. If the story had stopped there it would have been bad enough, but the vultures hanging around him wanted more. He was encouraged to spend his time (and his money, of course) on the useless quackeries of chelation and hyperbaric oxygen.
You would expect that these treatments would have some demonstrated benefit after some time, but fifteen months after Roy had had his fillings replaced, he was told that the amount of mercury in his body had increased! (He was eventually told that it had reached a level five times as high as when the treatment started.) At the same time he was being told that he needed more and more treatments in a compression chamber, although there was no evidence that his condition was improving. You might ask yourself why someone would tell him that he needed to sit in a compression chamber several times per day when it didn't seem to be doing him any good. The reason was that he and his family still had money left. You may wonder how the level of mercury in his body could increase alarmingly when the supposed source had been removed more than a year before. It was because the people selling him a "treatment" were taking the measurements. Think about it for a moment - if the reported levels never dropped, he would know that he was being scammed, but if they had actually dropped to nothing he might have wanted to stop paying. So they lied to him.
Roy Smith died on July 13, 1998. His death was a personal tragedy for his family and, like all needless deaths, diminishes us all. It would have been a tragedy for the chelationists and oxygen "therapists" as well, because a large part of their income would have gone. Unlike Donna, Ryan and Lori who lost a husband and father, however, the quacks would have just had to do a bit of advertising to get another Roy. The final chapter in this tragedy was when Roy realised that he had been conned and, with a system that let him type by moving his head and clicking a switch with his toe, he wrote the final words on his web site three months before he died: "PS. As of 4/16/1998, after taking 500mg. of DMSA daily for nearly three months, my mercury levels show even higher than last time".
The response I got when I wrote about Roy Smith was astounding. I was accused of damaging people by trying to stop them having their fillings out, I was "trashing" Roy and his memory, I was trying to gain benefit from his death. Someone even wrote to his widow about me. What nobody would address is that even if the ALS had been caused by the fillings in his teeth (it wasn't), what I was objecting to was not so much the removal of his fillings but the process of continuous lying that went on after that about how the level of mercury in his body went up and down. It could only go down unless the charlatans treating him were feeding him mercury, they were incompetent beyond belief, or they were lying to him. Again, no possible criticism of a form of "alternative medicine" was permissible or could even be contemplated.
I promised to talk about the implications of the responses I have received to comments about deaths. The common thread through these is that the opponents of medicine (I refuse to use the term "conventional medicine") accept no limits. Nothing is beyond the pale for them. No "alternative" to medicine goes too far, just as none appears too stupid for someone to believe. But just let a real doctor harm someone or fail to cure them