Robert Evans and Billy Wayne Davis dissect homeopathy's dangers, mocking its "knife cures knife" logic before exposing lethal risks like arsenic in remedies and deadly nightshade in Highlands Teething Products. They condemn the FDA's regulatory failures and Senator Tom Harkin's Section 2706 mandate, which forced insurance coverage without efficacy proof, citing infant deaths and Penelope Dingle's fatal cancer refusal. Ultimately, the hosts argue that powerful CAM lobbies prioritize taxpayer funding over safety, proving unproven treatments endanger lives while evading rigorous pharmaceutical standards. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:17
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Homeopathy Is Bullshit00:14:28
What's testing my fringe medical beliefs?
I'm Robert Evans, hosted Behind the Bastards, back with Billy Wayne Davis for part two of our homeopathy episode.
Yes.
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.
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 could rupture your eardrum.
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 machetis and out.
Oh, I now.
I'm with this.
We have to do this as a double-blind study, which means, Sophie, you're going to close your eyes.
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.
And then you tell us which one you feel better after.
And that will be a real medical study that will forever prove the validity of machetes.
You just make sure Anderson doesn't get harmed.
Anderson.
Anderson, your mom's blind and wielding machete.
Come over here.
Come on.
Your mom's blind and wielding a machete.
Good, Anderson.
Get over here.
No, don't be right under her with the machete.
She's protecting me.
She's a body or a dog.
Okay, sorry.
You got to close your eyes.
You can't know what you're getting first.
Okay.
She's under the table.
You got to close your eyes.
Okay, 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 machine.
My eyes are closed.
I can tell by the weight.
I'm going to guide your hand down towards the object, the copy of basic 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 better.
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.
Can 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 are 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 ball.
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 body.
I feel emotionally powerful.
It's good yogurt, right?
Do you feel confident?
Yeah.
Okay.
That was a funny way to answer that question.
Like, 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.
Well, we would have to do some research, really.
Y'all, I'm not a scientist.
Nor am I a doctor.
But I think this scientifically proves that machetes is a valid branch of medical science.
Yep.
She's still here.
Yep.
You're not dead.
And I think your ear is going to 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 a double-blind study.
But it might mean that just mixing types of knives is.
I just came up with the first principle of machetes in.
What's that?
Well, with homeopathy, it's like cures like.
And with machetes, it's knife cures knife.
Oh.
Yep.
Now we've got an actual practice.
Now we've got to be able to do it.
I'm assuming it's happening here.
Marketing.
Hot.
Also, more is more.
More is hard.
The more knives you got, the better you are as a doctor.
Shit.
I have some uncles.
Thank you.
I have some uncles that are going to be the best doctors in the world.
They're still alive.
There's no zoom propter hawk.
I don't know doctor talk.
My brother 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 podcast.
He's out there saving lives.
Well, he would be saving more lives if he listened to this study we just conducted.
And the rare chance, you do listen to this.
Hi, Jake.
Jake, give up conventional medicine.
Start practicing machetes and machetes.
Dr. Morris.
Dr. Jake Lichterman.
Machetison.
Which probably didn't bleep that name out.
Nope.
It cures low-tee.
It cures baldness.
It definitely cures low-tee.
Erectile dysfunction.
Oh, yeah.
Don't even need a dick when you get a knife.
You don't.
Now.
Yeah.
Okay.
Wow.
We're going to start this episode five and a half minutes later.
We had to test machetes, Sophie.
Sorry.
So over 5 million American adults and 1 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 just misguided.
Yeah.
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 venom control.
They think it can cure certain types of cancer.
There's a lot of different medicines in snakes.
A snake is like, when I get sick, I just go roll around in a pile of snakes.
God, that, oh, 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.
Are you?
Oh, yeah.
I think machetesin and snaketicin are complementary.
It's like being an oncologist and also other type of doctor.
I don't know medicine.
What I do know is that.
I don't know which one that wasn't.
There have been a lot of studies into homeopathic medicine to see how it works.
And 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, it doesn't work.
It does not work.
Quote, 11 independent systematic reviews were located.
Collectively, they failed to provide strong evidence in favor of homeopathy.
In particular, there was no condition which responds convincingly better to homeopathic treatment than to placebo or other control interventions.
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.
It's like if you're like, if you're giving people like you're testing a new 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.
I was going to say, I bet they're as thought out.
Now, unfortunately, while the machetes 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.
That by definition, an alternative to medicine would be poison.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It's the acid drink the guy made.
Yeah, that's what an alternative to medicine is.
Oh, it made it worse.
Yeah, and we, I should say, in some earlier episodes of this, I made fun of like taking turmeric for everything under the sun because if you go to a health food store in Los Angeles or a lot of hipper cities, you'll find turmeric on the shelves for fucking everything.
Turmeric has actual medicinal properties.
It's a powerful anti-inflammatory.
It does things.
Like 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 like 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.
Like, no, what you do is technically alternative medicine.
Yeah.
Because the earth's been medicining itself for a long time.
Yeah, that's why people like fucking Dr. Hahnman 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 an extract, the abstract from this, Billy Waynes, that you can get angry too.
Thanks.
I'm just going to make sure this VHS tape of basic instinct.
I hear 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: a 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.
Well, that's kind of where we're building to here.
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 podophilum.
Now, you know what arsenic is?
I'm aware.
Yeah, it's not great.
No.
You know what podophilum 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 he burns it off of?
Yeah.
But it's one that a doctor has to give you.
Yeah.
No, 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 podophilum.
It smells terrible.
It's awful.
Yeah, but.
Probably not as bad as the diarrhea ward after these kids were given nonsense medicine.
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 for 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 poison 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 with trained to mix chemicals like that.
No.
And yeah, there's actually a number of reasons.
Poisoning Sick Children00:09:35
So we're going to talk about that more in a second.
But for just one moment, I want to revel in the last paragraph from that homeopathic study.
And this is them trying to 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 diarrhea patients.
Yeah, if you give people diarrhea water, usually they don't die.
Yes, if you keep people hydrated, the body does some crazy, wonderful stuff every fucking time.
Yes.
Which is why Samuel Hondman 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.
Damn it.
Just, can you imagine writing that?
Yeah.
And then the editor would be like, let's make it sexier.
There's never been a good story that's opened with hundreds of babies.
You just don't, nothing good's going to come after that.
I mean, what a time we live in, too.
We're like, I think you got to go.
You got to start with the hundreds of babies.
Yeah, that's the lead is hundreds of babies.
Lead them to click on it.
Damn it.
It opens with a case from August 1st, 2010.
A mother gives her toddler three homeopathic pills to leave her teeth.
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 Highlands 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, Highlands teething tablets.
2010.
There's way more recent cases than that.
Oh, I got it to say.
Oh, yeah, you stuck it in the basic instinct copy.
Yep.
That is helpful in dealing with your feelings.
Thank you, Paul Verhoven.
Are you healed?
No, not yet.
It's only I have an eight-month-old.
So, like, it's just this.
I don't know.
Okay.
Yeah, it's not great.
It's not great.
This is not going to be an easy one.
So, Highlands, the company that made those homeopathic pills, bills itself as 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.
Yep.
That means it's good.
It does.
Now, it looks, and even the Highlands logo looks like a Purdue.
Like Pfizer or Purdue.
Yeah, 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 one of the reasons that these products are so popular is that the pharmaceutical industry is fucked and 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 will, it's just 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.
Because that's, you can't jog if you can't joggle.
You can't.
No, you cannot.
You don't want to go jogging.
Now, in tiny text on the top of Highlands' 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 Machetisin, 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 machetes and starter kit.
Yeah, we're going to bleep that out.
We are now selling machetes and starter kits.
Again, you get a free machete with every $500 copy of Machete Your Way to Better Health.
That's a good deal, you guys.
That is a great deal.
That's 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 Freddy, Danny, and Alex.
Now, Highlands products have names that are crosses between hyper-modern medicine and ancient snake oil remedies.
You can buy Nux Vomica, which sounds like something a Roman doctor would prescribe, and Bioplasma, which sounds like something you'd pick up in a space first-person shoe.
Bioplasma?
Yeah.
Or it sounds like something you sell in college to get beer money.
Yeah, it does.
You sell your bioplasma?
Yeah, man.
I got a good day loan.
I got $400 a month for it.
There's a guy in a van.
He wants it good.
All that bioplasma is paying from a tattoo.
You can't tell him I'm getting tattoos.
Don't tell them.
Do not let them know.
They do not want you getting sticking poked.
So you can find Nux Vomica and Bioplasma on the Highlands 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 Highlands 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.
Highlands all-natural baby killer pills.
We just had to rename it.
Say to give them their name.
Yeah.
Tell them what we actually.
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.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, if you're going to sell cigarettes to kids under the name, like, Uncle Gonzo's bubblegum-flavored cancer stick.
Okay.
Highlands still exist, doesn't it?
Oh, yeah.
Highlands 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.
The FDA.
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 in more than 370 children who had used Highlands 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 Highlands products, though the FDA says the question of whether those products caused the deaths is still under review.
Following an FDA warning in September, Highlands 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 Highlands where they're like they have so many products on their website.
Yeah.
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 it's connected to the teething pills.
Proved it.
This sucks.
But the money truck keeps showing up.
Yeah, we all have so much money.
You can't let just a couple dead babies get in the way of 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, is that a bad way to go into ads?
No, it's bad.
Speaking of babies living forever, these products and services that advertise on our show will make your babies live longer than Highlands all-natural baby killing pills.
That good?
Guarantee.
Guarantee.
That's a guarantee.
I feel like we can safely make that claim.
But if the FDA wants to come at me, go for it.
Products!
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
Beyond The Headlines00:03:39
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up-and-coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene from iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots, get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
Responsibility For AI00:15:05
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back.
We're back taunting the FDA, as per usual.
I think this is the administration to taunt the FDA.
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 Highlands teething products.
At Tropa Belladonna.
Yeah.
Deadly Nightshade.
Jesus.
Yeah.
Which is one of the plants that Samuel Hondman was a big fan of using in his home head to head as kids.
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.
And I think it's murdering someone, solid pick.
Get in that murder.
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 Highland 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 edibles.
Yeah.
Where, sure, we'd like to say that's 10 milligrams, but they don't know.
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.
It's frustrating because people rightly, like we just did an episode on the Sacklers and the opioid industry.
People who 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 like going like, McDonald's is shitty.
I'm going to Burger King.
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.
They're both garbage.
They're both garbage.
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 Bastards is, of course, supported by McDonald's in their corporate masters, Nordine Defense Systems.
Nordine Defense Systems.
Whether you want French fries or a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
We're killing it.
Shooting kids.
We're killing it.
Oh, this got really dark.
Can you hear me?
That's a double meaning, though.
They're doing really well as a company and they're also murdering people.
And they're also murdering people.
I could go on advertising really easy.
You could.
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 goose.
Because they're weak little goose.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
They're not supposed to be 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 a little bit of a bad thing.
Try the thing that's called deadly.
Give it to the baby.
Oh, this is the deadly nightshade.
That's the one for a baby.
Should we start with just the okay nightshade?
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 you.
Yeah, that is not surprising.
They are the largest homeopathic business in the United States.
They claim their products are safe and 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 when she said that?
And 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.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that our teeth are weak-ass baby.
That's your weak-ass baby.
Toughen that son of a baby.
Why don't 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.
Wait, 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.
Machetison.
Machetison.
Now machetes and sells new babies' machetes, 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 a nice car seat.
No.
None of that's going to get you as far as a $700 baby machete.
It is.
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.
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.
Yep.
Yeah.
That's true.
Yep.
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 then we'll go 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.
That is.
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 a promise.
Okay.
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: RE poison pills for babies.
Hey.
Maybe not.
Hey, 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, 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 is, that's actually kind of a tepid response.
Yeah, maybe a 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.
Yes.
You know, I was going to say going into this episode, there's no justified time to send boy, I shouldn't talk about mailing powders through the move right along.
Karina Talbot, a 26-year-old mother, told Scientific American that she picked Highlands 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 melodona.
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.
Yeah.
I think egos, I mean, the ego seems to be really involved in a lot of this stuff.
Well, ego, 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 kid.
And there is stuff where I was just talking about pacifiers, but like there have been cases where like pacifiers made by some shady company in a bad factory in like China or something.
It like lead on them and shit.
Like it does, it like there's a lot of.
Shit gets in the fucking formula too.
Exactly.
It's a scary one.
Nothing's perfect.
And so people like see natural on a label and assume it really means something.
It also assumes that natural, like they don't think about the fact that like ricin's natural.
Yes.
Like yes.
And they don't like my dad makes that joke.
He's like, organic.
Yeah.
He's like, what's that mean?
Yeah.
He's like.
It's mostly a marketing buzzword at this point.
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 to game.
You talk about like people are like, oh, it only uses organic pesticides.
Have you ever been in a farm that's been sprayed with organic pesticides?
It's just like as much sulfur as you could fit in a can.
That's all it is.
It's 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.
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 Talbot the mother here who like picked these teething products because they're natural have to be a bad person.
Like there's so much shit out there that like people make bad decisions by definition because it's so hard to pick the good information from the bad.
And it's just, it's complicated.
Yes.
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.
If it was Highlands brand nonsense water now with poison, like that's a fair.
I'm fine.
You can have that product.
Yeah, exactly.
So I'm going to quote from Karina Talbot again.
When our fourth kiddo comes around and starts teething at three months, we were like, okay, 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 107-23317, 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 kill-in pills.
So she reached out to them.
And here's Scientific American talking about Highland's 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.
No.
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 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.
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 kids' assholes to stop autism.
That's got to be a priority over the water selling nonsense.
Like you can see the logic there.
And also like all the other pill companies trying to just make all the illegal drugs legal.
Yeah.
Change the name.
So we're focused on that too right now.
Which we should just let people do so that I can buy Dilauded 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.
The CAM Lobby00:04:05
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.
They're millions of dollars in lobbying, too.
We're not shady enough yet.
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, we could make that money.
We 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.
According to Senator.
Jesus.
It's all fine.
Just the chiropractic.
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 complimentary medicine isn't all bunkum.
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.
It'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.
No.
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.
It's just a weird curtain to pull behind your.
What in the fuck?
Oh, it's a money thing.
It's a grift.
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.
And 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 ER, 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.
Well, and you don't think you're giving them anything, so why would you tell them?
FDA Delays Action00:04:46
Exactly.
It's natural.
Yeah, it's like, yeah.
You're like, 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.
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.
They do.
By far.
By far.
It's a fact.
Some Belladonna included.
Products!
Pervices.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene from iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
Unsafe Teething Products00:04:35
That's so funny.
Sherry, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, 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?
It is heavy.
It is heavy.
Yeah.
But I don't think that.
Just like really fucking angry.
But I am bad, huh?
Like, it's numbing.
My anger is numbing my ear pain because I'm just, I can't think about anything else.
It's a 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.
Figured it out.
We have top men on the project.
We use deadly night shade.
Only top men.
Top men and women.
Thank you.
And agender machete experts.
I don't know.
Top whatever.
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 were reported, Highlands pulled their baby nighttime teething tablets off the shelves.
They were adamant that their safety standards were incredibly stringent.
And to frame this as basically, we have to pull this stuff from the shelves because the FDA is a bunch of dicks.
That's the only way.
It 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.
Oh, it's these pussy babies.
Just on January 27th, 2017, the United States Food and Drug Administration posted this fun press release.
FDA confirms elevated levels of belladonna in 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 not taking the proper precautions.
But I don't have to.
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 if there weren't laws 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 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 pharmacopoeia.
Talk about the fox guarding the hen house.
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.
That's the senator who's a homeopath says that we should treat them as drugs except for when we have to prove they work.
Yeah, and 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 topracin.
Stopping Sexy Nonsense00:15:01
Topracin 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 topracin 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 of knee pain, and growing pains.
The section on information for parents and consumers states, Topracin 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.
Yeah, I knew toxins.
Yeah, they're in play.
Yeah, that was destined.
That was just been waiting.
I was like, they're going to say toxins.
I like this theory that this thing activates your body.
Yeah.
Like 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.
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.
Yeah, that's what 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 gotta 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.
It's medicine.
Sick medicine.
That's our new homeopathic supply cup.
Sick medicine.
Then nothing we do is a lie.
Oh, God.
That just destroyed myself.
I think we could get out of the podcast.
I think we could be millionaires.
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.
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.
When he gets impeached for letting a Russian dog dig in the yard or something.
I don't know.
I don't know what dogs.
They may come after us.
Presidential crime campaigns.
Anderson, Madam President Anderson.
Now, Billy Wayne, I bet you're wondering, what might the supposedly diluted homeopathic ingredients of this topracin miracle pain cream be?
I mean, I'm sure it's something great.
It's Belladonna!
Now, Billy, it's not just Belladonna, of course.
They mix in just a skosh of heloderma.
You know what heloderma is?
It's hela monster venom.
Okay.
That seems good for pain.
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 saw 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 in LA.
Yeah.
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.
Anticholinergic Toxicity, Secondary to Overdose of Topracin 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 dyslipidamy something.
His daily medications were pravastatin, metofluorol, enamelprin, 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 topracin topical pain relief cream.
He applied the cream liberally without respecting the recommended dosage.
The exact quantity and frequency were unknown.
Oh, 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 Gila monster venom and Belladonna on his foot, and that turns out to not be great.
I let the Gila monster bite me like four or five times.
Is that good?
You're really cutting out the middleman.
I just, I just, I gotta turn my ankle.
I've been saying for years, Billy, you were ahead of the pack by keeping that Gila 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 Gila monster we shipped to your house in a box.
Good for teething, good for foot pain.
$1,000.
No address.
I will make sure a Gila monster finds you.
The no address stamped envelope in $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 Gila monsters.
Just Gila monsters and machetes all over the place.
A Gila monster in every house and a machete in every hand.
Yes.
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 shifting.
Yeah, that we didn't foresee.
I do think there would be some stuff pop up that would be somewhere.
I didn't see that one coming.
But you know what?
We didn't think this through.
We've got to stay active.
That's true.
Stay on your toes with a Gila monster in the house.
You drink a lot of water.
Now, the good news is that this guy who overdosed on topracin did survive, but his symptoms were at one point serious enough that his doctors coded him for having a stroke.
So maybe stay away from topracin.
He spent some time disoriented and pissing himself in a hospital before the administration of IV Drugs was able to return him to baseline.
The suspected cause of his symptoms was Belladonna poisoning.
So we've been making fun of the Gila monster thing, but they suspect it was actually the Belladonna.
Yeah.
When that's the best part of the medicine.
No, the Gila monster venom was actually all right.
Thank God that was in there.
Thank God that was in there.
Really counteracted the Belladonna.
He just looks at his wife and looks, see, I'm all right.
I knew.
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 topracin 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 is they'll spend a lot more time talking with you.
And doctors are very busy.
They're usually often very often bad at talking to patients.
Good bedside manners are very rare in medicine, in my experience, and 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.
It's fucked.
It's super fucked up.
It's this fucking vaccine shit, too.
It's that same just a shadow of a doubt.
And 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 cures like.
To stop the danger of sexy nonsense doctors.
We need a charismatic woman.
Sexy good doctor.
Yes.
Yes.
It's the only thing that can save sex.
And their show is just called No.
Yep.
No.
And other doctors out there right now, maybe do more crunches.
Maybe do more crunches.
You know what that's up to?
One of my favorite things is to drive by a hospital and see a doctor outside Smopka.
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.
You're like, that's 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.
Yeah.
Hell yeah.
It's a good 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.
The only medicine that's just a man with a scoped rifle.
Can we sell that, Sophie?
That'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 sounds their fault.
Yeah, 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.
But Miss Dingell did not opt for that treatment.
She had a homeopathic doctor she trusted, Miss Scrayon.
And Miss Grayen told her that she could much more safely.
Miss.
Her name was Miss.
That's the most, it's better than doctor.
Yeah.
Now, Miss Grayen told her that she could 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 Miss Grayon's homeopathic medicine.
He later said, Penn had her mindset and it wasn't changeable.
You argue with her, is 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 caught up in trying to write a health book with them.
It's a complicated story.
I don't really know exactly.
But for months, Penelope and Miss Grayen 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 Miss Grayen even convinced her husband to help them write a book about treating cancer naturally once she was cured.
Dr. Dingell later said, Penn was in awe of Francine, Francine Scrayon, and I felt that Penn 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.
Penn repeatedly told me that Francine was convinced she could cure cancer.
Near the end of 2003, Penelope Dingle'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 Scraian 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.
Just a minute.
Now, wait a second.
Yeah.
Eventually, she realized that she'd been had by a con woman and wrote Francine Scraian a furious and 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.
It also may be that just sometimes you can't convince people when they get really roped in.
It's like a religious thing.
Like, that's a part of this.
Like, she believed in this woman.
She believed this woman.
And then.
Yeah.
And 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.
A Doctor Was Trash00:04:10
Yeah.
Whatever we can do at this point.
Fuck.
And now he's probably like, well, I'm going to kill that lady.
Yeah.
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 Scraan 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.
Don't.
Which is not illegal.
Nope.
You're just giving someone bad advice, which is in illegal.
Thank God we're all in jail.
Yeah, we would all be in jail 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 guaranteed to cure your tennis elbow because like cures like.
And since this is like tennis, it will fix your tennis elbow.
We're going to be healed.
We're going to be healed.
Is there, before we do this, is there any Belladonna in this?
Oh, shitloads.
I fucking doused everything in this room in Belladonna.
Oh, yeah.
And there's a Gila monster loose in here somewhere, too.
I don't think we're.
All right, gentlemen, take your positions.
All right.
We've got our now rather battered VHS take of the Michael Douglas Paul Verhoeven classic basic instinct.
I stabbed it pretty hard.
Actually, you should serve this time.
Okay.
I serve.
I'm going to go.
I've been doing it this way.
I'm going to go this.
Yeah, try an overhand.
Yeah, that seems good.
Damn it.
God, that felt good.
That was really close to our first actual hit.
That was cool.
And the dust came out.
And the dust came out.
That was really cool.
That's Belladonna right there.
High-grade Belladonna.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Oh, I almost had a volume.
Kind of.
Yeah.
I almost had a volume.
That was definitely our closest to.
Oh, boy, this tape has seen better days.
Seeing worse.
I'm going to 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.
All right, Billy.
Everyone, watch your eyes.
There's a pink Corvette down there, of course, because just to remind us that we're in Hollywood.
Yep.
Well, Billy, is that it?
No, let's do one more.
Do one more.
Because I think this one's really going to break apart when you got a machete.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
Yep.
I've lived enough life to know what just a reminder: everything we've done is approved by OSHA.
Yeah, I signed it.
No dogs were harmed in the making of this podcast.
Nope.
There's a lot of plastic shrapnel in the room, though.
Someone's going to have to.
Yeah, yeah, stick that up on the soundboard, Billy.
That'll be fine.
That'll make Daniel 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 and the names of this podcast on it.
And at some point in the next year, there will be a Gila 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.
No, inside your house.
That's the kind of...
And again, all of these products are FDA guaranteed to cure earaches, teething, colorectal cancer.
Works on all of it.
Every problem.
FDA.
Any problems with the FDA?
It'll solve that too.
Cash And Machetes00:02:54
As the school of machetes in states, knife cures knife, and if a machete won't fix it, a Gila 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 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.
Very true.
That's the episode.
Products.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones' Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.