October 27, 2025

The immortality of autism quackery

A bleach solution called “MMS,” hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT), chemical castration, chelation, and stem cell therapy - keep rising from the dead.

Where’s the garlic cure against wellness vampires?

Once upon a time, I was a contributor to Forbes, where I wrote about autism – a lot. Twelve years ago, in recognition of the pending arrival of Halloween, I wrote a piece called “The 5 Scariest Autism Treatments.”

The list consisted of the following: a bleach solution called “MMS,” hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT), chemical castration, chelation, and stem cell therapy.

Unfortunately, these people are still at it. As The Independent reported in June 2025, a full 12 year after I wrote about this for Forbes, Kerri Rivera, a key figure in the MMS world, is still out there on Instagram flogging actual, literal bleach as a “cure” for autism. From The Independent:

Messages seen by The Independent from Ms Rivera’s private support group reveal parents reporting vomiting, rashes, seizures and chemical-smelling urine in their children after following her advice.

She still has her account on Instagram [not going to link it], although TikTok immediately removed her account there after The Independent contacted the company. Rivera’s also still out there flogging books, such her “alternative first aid” (WTF) book instructing readers in how to use … yes, bleach … instead of actual first-aid techniques. In the lexicon of MMS true believers, the “curative” chemical is chlorine dioxide. To everyone else – and per straightforward experimental testing – that’s bleach. And somehow, this person keeps convincing parents to give it to their children.

Among the other four items on the list – chemical castration, chelation, HBOT, and stem cell therapy – well, they remain in play today, too.

Richard E. Frye, a key player in the “folinic acid cures autism” story the current US health secretary is trying to sell to Americans, is a provider at the Rossignol Medical Center, where HBOT is on the menu, still. RFK the Lesser’s wrong turn on health has certainly got the HBOT crowd excited.

Chemical castration, you ask, probably stunned? Yes. One of the current people whispering in RFK the Lesser’s ear is David Geier, who once worked with his physician father to “treat” autistic children with the chemical castration drug Lupron. The father, Mark Geier, was stripped of his medical license. The son, David, was fined for practicing medicine without a license. Obviously the perfect candidate to lead a major federal public health program. Back in 2013, apparently overflowing with optimism and a certain naivety, I wrote that “These two, in a 20-year-long run of damage, might now be reaching the end of their particular race.” Although Geier père has gone to the great grifter circus in the sky, as you can see, Geier fils is having a second act in this American life.

Oh, but chelation, you say wonderingly, which is understandable given that like HBOT, it’s harmed and even killed autistic children in the past. I am sorry to report that RFK the Lesser has sworn to “end the war” against chelation (among other things) at the FDA. Also on his list of things he thinks the FDA has been waging war on are HBOT and … yes, stem cell therapy.

It’s beyond unfortunate that the items on my original list have not died and been given the most indecent burial possible. But the people flogging these treatments are a cadre of wellness vampires who continue to evade the sunlight of science and evidence. They claim to offer wellness, but what their products really do is drain health and well-being from the children who are targets of these “treatments.” Meanwhile, the wellness vampires recharge their lifeblood by draining money from buyers’ bank accounts.

News you can use

• Speaking of autism “treatments” that just won’t die, the latest ABA rebranding is evidently to frame it as “trauma informed.” As Texas teacher Rebecca Engle explains, it is impossible for ABA to be trauma informed, as the two are mutually exclusive.
• Speaking of more autism treatments that just won’t die, electric shock devices used to torture autistic people were set to be banned this month. As deaf and disabled journalist Liam O’Dell writes, now that ban has been delayed by the FDA, the very agency that is charged with protecting us against harms via drugs, devices, and food. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network says about these devices:

These electric shocks are very painful. They can cause burns. “They also cause people to be scared and stressed. Many people develop mental health disabilities like anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. This is torture.

• More on things that should not be happening with drugs in the US: Reuters reports that the maker of Tylenol is asking the FDA to deny a petition-based request to change the product’s warning label to include autism. The FDA obviously should reject this request, as not rejecting it makes a mockery of these warnings and associates the possibility of being autistic as something that requires a “warning.”
• Relatedly, when “charities” that purport to exist on behalf of autistic people portray autistic people as “burdens,” well, that’s bad for autistic people. According to a piece by three academics in The Conversation, their work shows that “charities” tend to describe autistic people as a problem to be solved and then self-characterize as being the solution. Research indicates that generally speaking, autism-related groups like these broadly characterize autistic people in negative terms. The authors write:

We found that autistic people are largely portrayed as problems, as challenging and as a burden. Autistic people are frequently depicted as being needy and infantile. Every single charity depicts autistic people as needing to change. Autistic people, they say, should be more communicative or resilient. … In contrast, in these documents, charities – who did not appear to be led by autistic people – represented themselves as experts, with the authority to act for and speak on behalf of autistic people.

We’ve definitely heard that song before.

• Relatedly again, the findings of a preprint study suggest that when autistic children learn about being autistic in neutral, non-stigmatizing way through the lens of how an autistic person experiences the world, they feel pretty good about themselves! And the more they learned about autistic brains, the more likely they were to endorse that they liked being autistic.

People you should know

• Alyssa Hilary Zisk gave the keynote at the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ISAAC) virtual conference today, October 27. Zisk, an AAC user and researcher, also is on the editorial board for Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture.
• Timothy HoYuan Chan, a nonspeaking autistic man working on a doctorate in sociology at Australian Catholic University, does some mythbusting about autism in an essay published at The Independent. Chan, an AAC user, debunks three myths — that autistic people don’t use language, that autistic people can’t understand other people’s thinking, and that rocking, humming, or running away are done “for no reason.”

And he offers some suggestions, too: physical touch can aid an AAC user, giving autistic people “the time, space and permission to process social situations” helps with navigating social life, and those “meaningless behaviors” occur when “we feel highly unsafe and anxious in demanding situations.” News you can use, too. - Shoutout to Julius in the hometown crowd of Waco, Texas, for his comments to the local TV station on No Kings day: At 0:51 of the video, Julius, who is carrying a sign that reads, “better a product of Tylenol than a fascist,” calls RFK the Lesser’s comments about autistic people as burdens “upsetting” and “deeply misinformed and stereotypical behavior” he’s hoping to fight against.

At TPGA

We. Get. Tired! Recovering From Situational Autistic Burnout

Thanks for reading, and may we all get the time, space, and permission we need, when we need it.

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About the Author

Dr. Emily Willingham is a 2022 MIT Knight Science Project Fellow, and the author of several books, including the upcoming If Your Adolescent Has Autism: An Essential Resource for Parents from Oxford University Press, and has served as a regular contributor to Scientific American and other national publications.