Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Fake Doctors Who Gave Everyone Alzheimer's
Aired: 2024-03-26
Duration: 01:21:13


=== Deserve a Webby Award (04:23) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Poll Show are geniuses.
[00:00:09]  We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
[00:00:17]  Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
[00:00:20]  Yes, which by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:00:23]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:00:24]  I got that wrong.
[00:00:25]  But hey, no one's perfect.
[00:00:26]  We're pretty close, though.
[00:00:27]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Poll Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:34]  Saturday, May 2nd, country's biggest stars will be in Austin, Texas.
[00:00:39]  At our 2026 iHeart Country Festival, presented by Capital One.
[00:00:43]  See Kane Brown.
[00:00:46]  Parker McCollum.
[00:00:47]  Amanda Unique.
[00:00:48]  Riley Green.
[00:00:49]  This girl, Shabuzzi.
[00:00:52]  Dylan Scott.
[00:00:54]  Russell Dickerson.
[00:00:56]  Bename Gretchen Wilson.
[00:00:58]  Chase Matthew.
[00:01:00]  Lauren Elena.
[00:01:01]  Tickets are on sale now.
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[00:01:06]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:01:14]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:01:24]  There's an economic component to community thriving.
[00:01:27]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
[00:01:31]  Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:01:45]  Oh, boy, howdy.
[00:01:48]  What's killing my patience?
[00:01:52]  This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast that just, I would say, heroically allowed Dr. Cavehoda, our guest for today, to save a life before coming here.
[00:02:04]  We didn't, didn't demand that, that a man die for the sake of meeting our podcast schedule.
[00:02:10]  And I think we deserve an award for that.
[00:02:12]  You know, I don't know what kind of awards.
[00:02:14]  You were very gracious about that.
[00:02:15]  He thanks you.
[00:02:16]  I thank you.
[00:02:17]  We all thank you for that.
[00:02:18]  And I did have to run it by beforehand.
[00:02:21]  That is correct.
[00:02:21]  Yeah.
[00:02:22]  Yeah.
[00:02:22]  That's, you know, if you have a, if you know anyone on the Noel Committee, hit them up.
[00:02:26]  You know, we'll take a Webby Presidential Award of Freedom.
[00:02:31]  Any of them.
[00:02:32]  Any of them.
[00:02:32]  You know, I'm good with whatever.
[00:02:35]  And the Egot, all of the Egot awards we take.
[00:02:38]  Take a Webby Award for Freedom.
[00:02:40]  That's how, that's how I know I'm the only person on this call that has a Webby.
[00:02:44]  Sophie, you're the only person on this call who's ever had an award.
[00:02:48]  Yeah.
[00:02:49]  We've never been awarded Sophie.
[00:02:51]  One of my favorite through lines, you know, we are periodically fielding kind of pitches and stuff from folks in the television industry.
[00:03:00]  And I'm hopeful that, you know, one of these days we'll figure out how to make TV shows and stuff off of some of the stuff we're doing.
[00:03:06]  But in all of these pitch decks, people keep describing me as an award-winning journalist.
[00:03:10]  And folks, ladies and gentlemen, it's really fun to correct.
[00:03:15]  I have never received an award for anything.
[00:03:21]  Nor do I expect to.
[00:03:23]  Hey, you win the award of being the best business partner ever from me.
[00:03:30]  I got the only award that really matters to me, which wow, Sophie's turned on a Zoom bucket.
[00:03:37]  So when she says certain things, fireworks go off behind her.
[00:03:41]  It's really an interruption.
[00:03:44]  But I don't know what's doing it.
[00:03:45]  And so it just keeps happening.
[00:03:47]  And it's really just, oh, it just makes me seem so much cooler than I am.
[00:03:52]  I was leaving a nightclub in Los Angeles.
[00:03:55]  This was seven or eight years ago, and I had had far too much to drink.
[00:03:58]  And outside the nightclub was like the best dressed man I've ever seen in my life.
[00:04:02]  He had a waistcoat on, everything like shone, but not too much, incredible, like custom leather boots.
[00:04:09]  And I vomited into a trash can in front of him.
[00:04:12]  And he said, Good work, buddy.
[00:04:13]  And that's the only award I ever need.
[00:04:16]  You know, I don't know anything about that guy, but he was cool and he saw, he saw that I made it all into the trash can.

=== Fake Doctor Scam Exposed (15:03) ===

[00:04:23]  And he was like, this man's a fellow soul, a traveler on the road.
[00:04:29]  Anyway, this is a podcast about bad people.
[00:04:32]  And some bad people are doctors.
[00:04:37]  That's right.
[00:04:38]  What's that?
[00:04:39]  What's that show?
[00:04:39]  The good doctors.
[00:04:40]  And then it's, and then it's just you.
[00:04:42]  Look, it's just good doctors.
[00:04:45]  Plenty of good doctors.
[00:04:46]  If you look at Hollywood, it's always like every show about doctors or movie about doctors is basically everyone in the medical system is terrible except for this one guy who's willing to buck the system.
[00:04:59]  He's going to patch some atoms or whatever happens in the Patch Adams movie.
[00:05:03]  Yeah.
[00:05:03]  No, you know, we've, we've built, I would say probably about like 15 to 20% of this show's like legacy and audience has been built off the back of like quack doctors, most of whom were not real doctors.
[00:05:14]  You know, we've definitely covered some actual doctors who were monsters.
[00:05:18]  A lot of them came from the era back when anybody could be a doctor if you just said you were.
[00:05:22]  We always have fun with these.
[00:05:23]  And so I'm always on the lookout for like a good fake doctor story, right?
[00:05:28]  Yeah.
[00:05:28]  And periodically, especially, I think over the last year or two, I keep coming across stories of like, well, this is really interesting.
[00:05:34]  This is like a fake doctor or whatever that has like an intro.
[00:05:38]  It's an interesting story.
[00:05:39]  I want to tell it to people, but there's not that much here.
[00:05:41]  I get maybe two pages of script out of this, right?
[00:05:44]  And so my plan was I'm just going to collect three or four of these, you know, put them together and we'll probably get a good episode, maybe a one-parter or something out of it.
[00:05:52]  And then as I was putting together a couple of these little shorter fake doctor bastards, I kind of uncovered, I mean, I uncovered other people's reporting that uncovered like a massive sweeping nationwide healthcare scam by the insurance industry that is destroying public health and the lives of countless Americans.
[00:06:14]  So that's kind of what the story's going to be about.
[00:06:16]  But we've got some good medical bastards here.
[00:06:19]  Fantastic.
[00:06:20]  Yeah.
[00:06:20]  Let's fucking burn my career to the ground.
[00:06:22]  Forget it.
[00:06:23]  Let's do it.
[00:06:24]  Let's make burn bridges today.
[00:06:26]  I love it.
[00:06:27]  Well, the first guy we're going to talk about, you're not going to have to build any bridges for because this man, this man is a, and I promise this, this ties into our classic deep, sinister over theme here, but it's going to seem just kind of like a one-off at first.
[00:06:39]  And the guy we're going to talk about is Malachi Love Robinson.
[00:06:44]  That's a real name.
[00:06:45]  It sure is.
[00:06:46]  As far as I can tell, this is his actual name.
[00:06:48]  It's Love Hyphen Robinson.
[00:06:50]  You got a name like that.
[00:06:51]  You are destined for greatness or for jail.
[00:06:54]  One of the two.
[00:06:56]  It's prison or you solve a plague.
[00:06:59]  One of those two things.
[00:07:01]  It's Grift or Great.
[00:07:02]  None of the others.
[00:07:03]  Yeah, Grift or Great.
[00:07:04]  Yeah, there's no Malachi Love Robinson, just like Moe and his lawn, you know, working a nine-to-five as an accountant.
[00:07:11]  No, you go big.
[00:07:12]  You go big or you wind up dying in a cell.
[00:07:16]  So back in the winter of 2014 to 2015, a young doctor started doing rounds at St. Mary's Medical Center in West Palm Beach, Florida.
[00:07:26]  I'm sure you can correct me if I get something wrong, but my understanding is that large hospitals and the like often have groups of young doctors rotating through them as they finish residency requirements, right?
[00:07:36]  This is part of how you become whatever doctor stereotype reference the Zoomers will recognize right now.
[00:07:41]  I don't know what doctor show is on TV.
[00:07:43]  They probably haven't seen House.
[00:07:44]  It's still fucking Grey's Anatomy.
[00:07:46]  Gray's Anatomy.
[00:07:47]  It's still Gray's Anatomy.
[00:07:48]  They are still on TV.
[00:07:49]  It's incredible.
[00:07:50]  No, I could do a whole show on Grey's Anatomy.
[00:07:52]  See, and this is why the Zoomers are not popping enough pills.
[00:07:56]  They didn't have Hugh Laurie making it look good for us.
[00:07:59]  God damn it.
[00:08:00]  That's tragic.
[00:08:01]  So for about a month, this new doctor, Malachi Love Robinson, was a regular presence at these clinical rotations.
[00:08:08]  He'd walk around with a lab coat that read anesthesiology.
[00:08:11]  He would tell people he was a doctor.
[00:08:13]  At one point, an OBGYN at the hospital received a letter from Malachi asking, hey, can I shadow you?
[00:08:20]  And I think he found this a little odd.
[00:08:22]  It's not totally weird, you know, but he was like, okay, this is not the way people usually ask for this sort of thing.
[00:08:29]  And hospitals are busy places.
[00:08:30]  So whatever kind of odd impression Malachi occasionally gave off usually sort of gave way to the fact that everybody's got shit to do, right?
[00:08:36]  There's like, there's people bleeding to death and stuff.
[00:08:39]  You don't spend too much time worrying about the weird-looking kid, right?
[00:08:42]  Yeah.
[00:08:42]  Okay.
[00:08:43]  Yeah, whatever.
[00:08:43]  Yeah.
[00:08:43]  Come on.
[00:08:44]  Come on.
[00:08:44]  Clearly, you're supposed to be here.
[00:08:46]  You have a coat.
[00:08:47]  You look like a doctor.
[00:08:47]  Yeah, yeah, come on.
[00:08:48]  There wouldn't just be a random boy in the hospital, right?
[00:08:53]  But that's exactly what happened.
[00:08:55]  And I'm going to read a quote from an article in the Sun Sentinel.
[00:08:58]  Staff at the medical center's OBGYN office was alerted by a patient that a young male who, quote, appeared to be a child was dressed as a doctor and was inside an exam room.
[00:09:08]  Another security guard told police she had seen the boy gain access to secured areas of the hospital in the past week.
[00:09:13]  Security footage showed the boy entering the lobby from the parking lot.
[00:09:16]  Officers saw the car parked outside and could see a white lab coat on a hangar in the back seat.
[00:09:21]  When interviewed by police, the teen told them that he has been a doctor for years and that his family could vouch for him.
[00:09:27]  Oh, no.
[00:09:28]  Oh, I'm just realizing that he specifically went for Ob Gein.
[00:09:32]  Yeah.
[00:09:33]  Oh, what a fucking turd.
[00:09:34]  If he was just some sort of like precocious youth who was like, I want to learn medicine and be Doogie Hauser, I'd be like, I would have a little like love for that.
[00:09:42]  A little part of me would appreciate that.
[00:09:45]  But now I see what he's doing.
[00:09:46]  He's just like a young kid who wants to see boobs and stuff.
[00:09:49]  That's probably it, right?
[00:09:50]  He never will admit that, but that is my guess as to why he's kind of like specifically trying to do OBGYN stuff.
[00:09:57]  And like, it is, it's, it makes sense that it's a patient who first makes the report because they're kind of, they're just stuck in a bed and they see this kid and they're like, there's no way that's a doctor.
[00:10:07]  This is clearly a child.
[00:10:09]  Why, why is a child in this room with a lab coat on?
[00:10:12]  Oh my God.
[00:10:13]  When did this happen?
[00:10:14]  This happens like 2014, 2015.
[00:10:17]  Not all that long ago, right?
[00:10:22]  So eventually, and again, this only takes a couple of months, which is longer than you'd expect, but he's not, it doesn't go on for that long.
[00:10:29]  And the police get called, right?
[00:10:31]  So there's some news reports that a child was, and none of these reports, by the way, name Malachi because you don't, as a journal, in journalism, you don't name children who commit crimes, right?
[00:10:40]  It's a pretty hard and a fast rule because they're children.
[00:10:43]  Like this is bad, but he is still a child.
[00:10:45]  We know his name because of crimes he continues to commit as an adult, as a spoiler for where this is going.
[00:10:51]  So the police, you know, take him into custody.
[00:10:54]  There's news reports at the time note that his mother, like, said he was ill.
[00:10:57]  He was refusing to take medicine, but he was under the care of a doctor.
[00:11:01]  She was kind of insinuating maybe he was pretending to be a doctor because of that.
[00:11:04]  I don't actually know if any of that's true or if his mom was just lying.
[00:11:08]  It was all really suspicious and weird.
[00:11:09]  But again, Malachi is a minor.
[00:11:11]  So he gets some, you know, minor punishment.
[00:11:14]  And the case sort of drifts away without much comment because there's not really much else to do when a kid commits a crime like this.
[00:11:21]  You know, it's not a, it's certainly a bad thing to do, but there's no like, there's no victim, right?
[00:11:26]  He didn't hurt anybody in a way that we can, you know, define yet.
[00:11:31]  I mean, I'm really fascinated to know what they let him do.
[00:11:34]  Because like when I take medical students or residents like around for like rounds and I'm like teaching them, I will, you know, with the patient's consent always is like, hey, can he listen to your heart?
[00:11:45]  Can he do this abdominal exam?
[00:11:47]  I'm really wondering if he was just walking around watching them or if he was like trying to get handsy with these.
[00:11:54]  Hospitals are cagey about it.
[00:11:56]  My guess is that just because he was kind of nervous, he didn't push to do it the way like a real resident who's actually trying to get some hands-on experience might.
[00:12:04]  But it probably wasn't nothing too.
[00:12:06]  Like the hospital kind of wants you to think it's nothing, but like, I don't know, guys.
[00:12:10]  He was there a while.
[00:12:12]  What I'm fascinated to know is like usually people are walking around with like notepads writing down stuff.
[00:12:17]  Like, I'm wondering if he had like a notepad and if like anyone looked at it, it was just like drawings.
[00:12:22]  Like drendoodling boobs and stuff.
[00:12:26]  This little creep, perhaps.
[00:12:30]  Creep.
[00:12:31]  Not impossible.
[00:12:33]  So, you know, this is the kind, there's a number of reasons a kid might do this.
[00:12:36]  He might just legitimately want to be a doctor and also be a child and thus bad at knowing what's appropriate.
[00:12:43]  This could also be someone who's mentally ill.
[00:12:45]  There are certain mental illnesses.
[00:12:47]  People often get weirdly obsessed with doctors and medicine.
[00:12:50]  That's not what's going on with Malachi.
[00:12:53]  He is a con artist, and we're going to learn this later.
[00:12:55]  Because about a year after this happens, when Malachi is now an adult, Floridians wake up to the opening of a new medical clinic in their area: New Birth, New Life, Medical Center, and Urgent Care, LLC.
[00:13:08]  On the website is a stock image of a racially diverse group of awkwardly smiling actors pretending to be doctors.
[00:13:14]  And below that is this text: New Birth, New Life, Medical Center, and Urgent Care's mission is to provide personalized, high-quality, holistic, and alternative medical care on an as-needed or preventative basis.
[00:13:25]  The only staff member listed is Dr. Malachi Love Robinson.
[00:13:29]  And despite having just been arrested for looking like a child dressed as a doctor, he could not help but pick a photo and bio for himself that screamed, child pretending to be a doctor.
[00:13:40]  Have you ever seen a child, a more obvious child pretending to be a doctor than that?
[00:13:45]  This is so Robert has the photo on the screen now.
[00:13:49]  We're watching, looking at this, and it does.
[00:13:52]  I do remember seeing this now that you put this up.
[00:13:54]  Yeah.
[00:13:55]  And oh my goodness, it looks like a child, like a sweet, sweet boy.
[00:13:59]  You want to pinch his cheeks.
[00:14:00]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:14:01]  Knowing what I do now, I want to pinch them really hard.
[00:14:04]  Yeah.
[00:14:04]  Like really hard, like painfully hard.
[00:14:07]  It looks like, you know, when I was in high school, my high school offered like a pre-pre-med program where you could actually do some very limited, like clinical rotations.
[00:14:15]  And I think you'd be kind of certified as an EMT sort of by the time you graduated high school.
[00:14:20]  It was like for kids who wanted to be doctors and stuff.
[00:14:23]  It looks like the photos they would take.
[00:14:25]  Like, you're clearly a child, but like you've gotten access to a lab coat.
[00:14:30]  No one in medicine has that much enthusiasm in their smile anymore.
[00:14:34]  No, not the young ones.
[00:14:35]  They don't have that time they've got their PhD.
[00:14:39]  Oh, wait, hold on a second.
[00:14:40]  He had a PhD.
[00:14:41]  I missed that.
[00:14:42]  No, he's claiming to.
[00:14:43]  He's listed himself as Love Robinson, PhD, HHPC, AMPC.
[00:14:48]  I don't know what those other two are.
[00:14:49]  Whoa.
[00:14:50]  I don't either.
[00:14:51]  I think they have to do with because he's not just pretending to be a real doctor.
[00:14:54]  He's pretending to be a real doctor who's also like a naturopath.
[00:14:57]  He can do food and herb therapy, psychotherapy, electrotherapy, physiotherapy, mechanic.
[00:15:03]  And also, by the way.
[00:15:04]  Do people think he learned this when he was like four?
[00:15:06]  He's so young.
[00:15:07]  How would he learn all this stuff?
[00:15:09]  If somebody is saying that they are both a regular doctor and can do psychotherapy on you and electrotherapy on you and herb therapy on you, they're probably not able to do any of those things.
[00:15:20]  I just want to point out that I went to go look up what HHP-C meant.
[00:15:24]  And the first thing that comes up is the Reddit thread about this guy.
[00:15:29]  The second thing that comes up is teen charge with pretending to be a doctor.
[00:15:33]  So I don't know if HHP-C is a mean anything.
[00:15:37]  And if it is, let us know.
[00:15:39]  That's just like doctors will love to put like these titles after their name, like MD, Ph.D.
[00:15:45]  Oh, yeah.
[00:15:46]  P-I-M-P-G-O-D.
[00:15:47]  Like we just love it.
[00:15:49]  Can't get enough of that.
[00:15:51]  brother's job title is like three sentences.
[00:15:56]  Jesus.
[00:15:57]  Yeah.
[00:15:57]  You know what?
[00:15:58]  See, this is why real jobs like podcaster, you could just say in a single word, you know, exactly.
[00:16:04]  My real work, when I'm really giving back to humanity.
[00:16:07]  My calling.
[00:16:08]  My calling.
[00:16:09]  Yeah.
[00:16:10]  I've been covered in blood because of my job too, Kava.
[00:16:13]  It wasn't saving a life, but there was a lot of blood.
[00:16:17]  So about a month after this website goes up, an 80-something year old West Palm resident named Anita Morrison starts experiencing stomach pain, like most people do in this situation.
[00:16:27]  I think she Googles like urgent care or something.
[00:16:29]  She's looking for like clinics near me, right?
[00:16:32]  And, you know, our lives are governed by algorithms from various search engines and apps.
[00:16:38]  And one of them decided the closest clinic to her was New Birth New Life Medical Center.
[00:16:43]  I do think Malachi, part of why there's so many different terms for all sorts of different treatments in there is so that it'll get pulled by an algorithm, right?
[00:16:51]  He's clearly had some understanding of like, if I phrase this in a certain way online, my business will be suggested to people who are nearby who need medical help, right?
[00:17:02]  NBC News describes what happened next.
[00:17:05]  She called the office located in her hometown of West Palm Beach and spoke with a man named Dr. Malachi Love Robinson, who offered to pay her an in-home visit.
[00:17:12]  Wearing a white lab coat and stethoscope slung around his neck, Love Robinson examined Morrison, focusing on her legs, heart and lungs, she said.
[00:17:19]  He told her she had arthritis.
[00:17:21]  Then he sold her natural vitamins to dole the discomfort.
[00:17:24]  She said she allowed the babyfaced physician to return four more times.
[00:17:27]  Although by early January, she realized something wasn't right inside her home.
[00:17:31]  Personal checks went missing.
[00:17:33]  So he's just sort of robbing this old lady.
[00:17:37]  Wow.
[00:17:38]  Using being a doctor to get into her house and then taking stuff from her.
[00:17:42]  The Washington, yeah, it's gross, right?
[00:17:45]  Makes me so mad.
[00:17:47]  It makes me so mad.
[00:17:49]  Yeah.
[00:17:50]  Like, it's just like the, I mean, you know, as doctors, I'll be the first to say we're not perfect and call us out for our many, many faults.
[00:18:01]  Of course not.
[00:18:01]  I've even heard of a podcaster or two who's done bad things.
[00:18:04]  Oh, I have not, never, never.
[00:18:06]  But definitely it's happened.
[00:18:09]  And it's like we try our best to create a sense of trust with our patients.
[00:18:17]  And to do a house visit is a pretty uncommon thing.
[00:18:21]  And it's such a rare thing that when I hear of it happening still, and it still does happen rarely, there's a part of me that loves it just because like it is the most old-fashioned, the heart of medicine going to where the patient's at, both, you know, literally and also in some senses, you know, figuratively, meeting them where they're at.
[00:18:43]  And in this case, he's taken that trust and he is using it to his own nefarious gains.
[00:18:51]  And it really pisses me off because at least when a doctor, I mean, I don't know if it's better when a doctor does it, a bad thing or not.
[00:18:58]  But, you know, the fact that someone is muscling in and trying to use our title in that way, like we don't have enough problems, makes me so angry.
[00:19:06]  Oh, yeah.
[00:19:07]  I hope something bad happens to this kid.
[00:19:09]  Yeah, I mean, it doesn't go like, yes, as a spoiler, it does.
[00:19:14]  So the Washington Post reports that the final straw for Anita, the woman that he is stealing from, comes when she calls him over because she's, again, she keeps experiencing pain, probably because he's not treating whatever her other relationship is.
[00:19:26]  Yeah.

=== Drugless Practitioner Lies (09:04) ===

[00:19:27]  And he tells her that she needs to go to the hospital, right?
[00:19:30]  And his plan was to rob her home after she was taken away and blame anything missing on the fact that, well, you're old, you know, you just forgot, right?
[00:19:37]  But Anita hands him her purse as she's being taken away by like the EMTs and to put back in her house.
[00:19:43]  And he takes her checkbook and he starts cashing fraudulent checks all around town.
[00:19:48]  So that makes it pretty easy for her to call the authorities and they set up a sting, bada bang, bada boom, he gets arrested, right?
[00:19:54]  This is the point at which the news starts covering the story.
[00:19:56]  Malachi was 18 now, which meant they could publish his name.
[00:20:00]  And he had now robbed an old lady if it turned out to be like $34,000.
[00:20:04]  So at this point, we're like, he does not deserve the benefit of, you know, maybe he could get better here.
[00:20:09]  Let's put him on blast effectively, right?
[00:20:11]  This is not like him being like, he's a sick kid who needs help.
[00:20:16]  I mean, this is really thought out.
[00:20:18]  Yeah.
[00:20:18]  I mean, it's not a bad strategy, to be honest with you.
[00:20:21]  No, no, no.
[00:20:22]  When someone's going to the hospital, there's so much chaos around that and they're so sick and they have so many other things to worry about.
[00:20:27]  You would think that it's the last thing on their mind to think about where their checkbook is.
[00:20:31]  Of course.
[00:20:31]  So it's really well thought out and it's so despicable.
[00:20:35]  Oh, yeah, no, it is.
[00:20:36]  And it shows, you know, he's got, he's obviously smart enough.
[00:20:38]  He understands how to manipulate the internet and these algorithms in order to, you know, put himself in a position.
[00:20:44]  He's got some degree of social manipulating ability, but he also doesn't seem to have the self-control.
[00:20:49]  I think a more skilled con man would have been like, okay, I've gotten five, 10 grand out of this old lady.
[00:20:53]  Time to move on.
[00:20:54]  You know, like eventually she'll notice and that'll get me in trouble.
[00:20:57]  So I'm going to, I'm going to mosey on down the street.
[00:21:01]  Not trying to give people advice.
[00:21:02]  I'm just analyzing this guy.
[00:21:05]  One of the things that's interesting, when you read articles about him, some of them, like the Washington Post piece, have these details about his family.
[00:21:12]  And every single fact you learn about this guy sounds like another scam that we just haven't uncovered yet.
[00:21:18]  It's amazing.
[00:21:19]  Quote, Love Robinson's grandfather, William Robinson, said this is all a misunderstanding.
[00:21:24]  He told the Sun Sentinel that the teen never claimed to be a medical doctor, just a holistic doctor, and that he held certificates to practice from online schools.
[00:21:31]  He was pursuing things, but I don't really know what it came to, Robinson said.
[00:21:35]  He was pursuing the field that he wanted to get into.
[00:21:37]  A local station, WPBF, realized this kid was willing to talk and smelled like this.
[00:21:42]  They're like, okay, there's content here.
[00:21:44]  So they reach out to this kid and they're like, hey, is there any chance you were the little boy who pretended to be a doctor at that hospital last year?
[00:21:53]  And Malachi's answer was, I requested to shadow physicians.
[00:21:56]  Next thing I know, cops are there.
[00:21:58]  That's all I know.
[00:21:59]  I have no idea.
[00:22:00]  NBC does more digging because by now reporters are calling Malachi Dr. Love.
[00:22:06]  And I think they're doing that.
[00:22:08]  I think whoever did that was like, there's a pretty good chance this gets turned into a Netflix series and I want it to be based off of my article.
[00:22:14]  So let's try to find a title here.
[00:22:16]  Yeah.
[00:22:16]  And they find out that he does have one seemingly legitimate qualification, which is a certification from the American Association of Drugless Practitioners.
[00:22:25]  You heard of these guys, Kava?
[00:22:27]  I have not, but I don't love the sound of it.
[00:22:29]  No, no, that's because they're bullshit.
[00:22:31]  They are like a real thing.
[00:22:33]  They're just a real thing for conmen, right?
[00:22:35]  Yeah.
[00:22:36]  Ah, conmen's not the right term.
[00:22:37]  They're a real thing for kooks, for cranks, you know?
[00:22:41]  Not saying that like you always need to use drugs to treat problems.
[00:22:44]  There's a number of problems that have treatments that aren't based in drug giving people.
[00:22:50]  Yeah, but all of my problems require drugs, Sophie.
[00:22:54]  Like my problem of being sober, which is why I need to drink this Kratom lemonade.
[00:22:59]  You know, I will say this while he drinks his kratom lemonade, which he just took a huge swig of.
[00:23:05]  Oh, yeah, baby.
[00:23:06]  You know, I'm not going to sit here and say that Western medicine has the complete knowledge of everything that happens with the patient.
[00:23:13]  I mean, there's lots that we can learn from other places and I'm open-minded to things.
[00:23:18]  But, you know, we look for proof, we look for evidence.
[00:23:21]  And when there's not, there's this big vacuum.
[00:23:25]  And in that vacuum gets all that space gets filled with grifters.
[00:23:30]  Almost all of it.
[00:23:32]  And yeah, it's one thing to be like, you know, I have had, you know, I had a lower back problem, right?
[00:23:37]  That I dealt with through like a physical therapy regimen.
[00:23:41]  I didn't use drugs for it.
[00:23:42]  Sometimes that works, but saying that I'm just a drugless medical practitioner.
[00:23:47]  No, sometimes, how are you going to druglessly treat the flu?
[00:23:50]  Like, how are you going to deal with like cancer without any drugs?
[00:23:54]  Right.
[00:23:54]  You know, like medication exists for a reason.
[00:23:57]  Right.
[00:23:57]  Yeah.
[00:23:58]  Up to your beautiful four-parter on Steve Jobs for that.
[00:24:01]  Yeah.
[00:24:01]  Yeah.
[00:24:02]  Exactly.
[00:24:02]  Look, look, look at what happened with Steve when he tried to cure his cancer with apples.
[00:24:07]  Um, so the American Association of Drugless Practitioners are based out of Galveston, which is the first black mark against them.
[00:24:14]  Nothing good comes out of Galveston, nor will it ever.
[00:24:18]  More to the point, anyone can join their organization.
[00:24:21]  Not any doctor, anybody, right?
[00:24:24]  So you can be a drugless practitioner, which, like, I don't know, if you're just like Ted who works as an accountant or whatever, like, what are you a drugless practitioner of accounting?
[00:24:37]  Yeah, you don't have to be any kind of medical professional, right?
[00:24:40]  Essentially, the number of people who could join this association like is encompasses everyone on earth, right?
[00:24:46]  If you ever treated a cold by just like waiting until it got better, congratulations, you qualify.
[00:24:52]  Yeah.
[00:24:54]  So the AADP is primarily a way for holistic practitioners without real qualifications to say, number one, this is a thing that I can like put in a frame, right?
[00:25:04]  I can have it up in my office or whatever, and it looks like I've, it looks like a certification, right?
[00:25:09]  To somebody who doesn't know anything.
[00:25:11]  And it's also kind of a way to say, I don't prescribe medication, so you can't get angry at me for saying I'm a doctor, right?
[00:25:18]  And giving someone wild honey for their lymphatic cancer or whatever, because that's just not the kind of doctor that I am.
[00:25:25]  NBC reached out to the group's director and were like, hey, this absolute con man who robbed a lady said that he was certified by your organization.
[00:25:33]  And the guy who runs the AADP was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
[00:25:38]  Our credentials don't confer the ability to diagnose your treat patients, right?
[00:25:43]  That's not what this is about.
[00:25:44]  So like, what the fuck is it about?
[00:25:45]  It's just there so quack doctors can stick a thing on their wall, right?
[00:25:50]  I recognize also that I might sound a bit hypocritical here when I say this, but because I'm a member of the Universal Life Church and I'm a reverend.
[00:26:01]  That's the next paragraph, bro.
[00:26:03]  God damn it.
[00:26:05]  So this guy, the head of the AADP, says that like, because Malachi lied about being a doctor, we've kicked him out of the AADP.
[00:26:12]  You know, we police our own, right?
[00:26:14]  And I'm going to continue from NBC here.
[00:26:16]  This is where we bring in the Universal Life Church.
[00:26:19]  In addition, Love Robinson's doctorate was from the online Universal Life Church seminary, according to documents released by the Florida Department of Health.
[00:26:27]  The degree in divinity can be bought from the site for $29.95.
[00:26:31]  You will be legally entitled to use the title doctor in front of your name, indeed, after your name, the website says.
[00:26:37]  Now, look, Kave, I also have used the Universal Life Church to allow me to do things to people, like marry them.
[00:26:47]  That was a creepy way to phrase that.
[00:26:48]  Wow, got a lot of military.
[00:26:50]  I enjoyed that sentence.
[00:26:52]  Did things to people for sure.
[00:26:54]  Some people might say that's invasive.
[00:26:56]  Look, the Universal Life Church has meant a lot of fun for all of us.
[00:27:00]  But there's no reason to include the line, you will be legally entitled to use the title doctor, unless you're selling this for scammers who are going to run cons.
[00:27:09]  Like, we can all agree that, right?
[00:27:11]  There's no other reason to say that.
[00:27:14]  I have to say, yes, I do agree.
[00:27:15]  And that bothers me.
[00:27:16]  To be honest with you, so I did it also so I could marry some of my friends.
[00:27:20]  I mean, I didn't marry them myself.
[00:27:21]  I married them.
[00:27:22]  No, yeah, we know about you sleeping in Mr. Life.
[00:27:25]  Yeah.
[00:27:26]  So, you know, I thought the term that you could use was healer.
[00:27:30]  I didn't realize you could use the word doctor.
[00:27:32]  I feel like that is a big difference.
[00:27:34]  Well, because it's the doctorate of divinity.
[00:27:36]  Yeah, you didn't have to worry about that.
[00:27:37]  You already have that title.
[00:27:39]  Yeah, this is true.
[00:27:40]  Yeah, I guess maybe I wasn't paying attention.
[00:27:41]  I'll have to look back at that.
[00:27:43]  Speaking of the Universal Life Church, you know who else has the right to marry anyone they want?
[00:27:50]  I'm going to guess Blue Apron can marry people at all.
[00:27:53]  Even if you don't want to get married, they can force you to get married.
[00:27:56]  They can, and they often do.
[00:27:58]  Look, if you see anyone with the Blue Apron armband, run.
[00:28:02]  Run for your life.
[00:28:04]  Your freedom means nothing to them.
[00:28:10]  I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
[00:28:13]  I was, hi, dad.
[00:28:14]  And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
[00:28:22]  This is this badass convict.
[00:28:24]  Right.
[00:28:25]  Just finished five years.
[00:28:27]  I'm going to have cookies and milk.
[00:28:29]  Come on.

=== Convict Gets Cookies and Milk (03:01) ===

[00:28:31]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[00:28:39]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[00:28:47]  The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[00:28:56]  I'm an alcoholic.
[00:28:58]  And without this program, I'm going to die.
[00:29:02]  Open your free iHeartRadio app.
[00:29:04]  Search the Ceno Show and listen now.
[00:29:10]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
[00:29:15]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:29:23]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:29:32]  If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
[00:29:37]  Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:29:40]  They believe everything.
[00:29:41]  But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:29:45]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:29:48]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:29:52]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:29:55]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:29:56]  They do not have homes.
[00:29:57]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:30:00]  Listen to Eating Wild Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:30:09]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[00:30:18]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[00:30:24]  I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
[00:30:29]  This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
[00:30:39]  If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
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[00:30:53]  Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
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[00:31:13]  Ah, we're back.
[00:31:15]  Back hold up in three separate undisclosed locations, hiding from Blue Apron's shock troops as they comb the West Coast.
[00:31:25]  That's what we need.
[00:31:26]  Another Blue Apron conspiracy that our listeners are going to take to be truthful.

=== Nightmare Medical Billing (13:10) ===

[00:31:32]  Yeah.
[00:31:33]  Yeah.
[00:31:33]  You know, Sophie, I thought I was going to be better about this sort of thing, but it's like we always say on the show, power corrupts, and it's also really fun to be corrupt.
[00:31:42]  So I'm just going to keep going.
[00:31:44]  You are such a healer, Dr. Thank you.
[00:31:46]  Please, thank you, Reverend Dr. Evans.
[00:31:48]  That's a real one, though.
[00:31:49]  That comes from the state of New Jersey, you know, and that's an actual state, allegedly.
[00:31:54]  Comes from the state of New Jersey.
[00:31:56]  Wow.
[00:31:56]  They have trees.
[00:31:57]  They have nice trees.
[00:31:59]  They got nice trees.
[00:32:00]  My old boss, Dan O'Brien.
[00:32:02]  He's a soprano.
[00:32:03]  He's a soprano.
[00:32:03]  So I'll take it back.
[00:32:05]  That's three good things.
[00:32:06]  That's more than you get from Oklahoma.
[00:32:08]  Lower your taxes.
[00:32:11]  Great.
[00:32:12]  So the state of Florida, playing against type, stopped allowing naturopaths to examine patients in 1957.
[00:32:19]  I was actually shocked when I heard this.
[00:32:20]  I was shocked.
[00:32:21]  That is better than I thought Florida would be doing on that.
[00:32:24]  Given what their surgeon general is doing currently, that is amazing.
[00:32:27]  That must have been done well before he was there.
[00:32:30]  Yeah.
[00:32:30]  I mean, this is 57, right?
[00:32:32]  Now, and it's also not as good as it sounds because while they're not allowed to examine patients, they are allowed to consult on patients.
[00:32:38]  And this is kind of the gray area that Dr. Love was hoping to sail through once he got caught, right?
[00:32:43]  That like, I'm not treating patients.
[00:32:44]  I'm consulting.
[00:32:45]  I have the right.
[00:32:46]  But like, he also stole a bunch of people, right?
[00:32:49]  Money from people.
[00:32:50]  And in addition to stealing money from people, the way that he was able to like, because he was, he was like billing Medicare too for the treatments that he was doing because he's working at these old ladies.
[00:32:59]  And, you know, as you, I'm sure you know, Kava, in order to bill Medicare, you have to have what's called an NPI or national provider number.
[00:33:08]  This is the number that Medicare and also health insurance companies use it to identify physicians for the purpose of approving billing, right?
[00:33:14]  It's the number of people.
[00:33:15]  I'm never going to give you mine, Robert.
[00:33:16]  So stop asking.
[00:33:17]  Yeah, well, all I need is your signature for my purposes right now.
[00:33:22]  When I first started looking into Malachi's case, it was not clear to me how he faked his NPI.
[00:33:27]  And the articles I read seem to be kind of like confused on the matter, right?
[00:33:30]  I think there were a couple of different theories posited.
[00:33:33]  But when I looked into it, this is what's getting into the actual like over-conspiracy of the episode.
[00:33:39]  It's like anyone can fake an MPI.
[00:33:42]  It's the easiest thing in the world to do.
[00:33:44]  There is absolutely no protections stopping people from faking this.
[00:33:49]  And why that is the case and how health insurance companies play into it is kind of going to be the big overarching theme of the episode.
[00:33:56]  But what matters for the moment is that once he's in the system and he's got his NPI, he found it easy to get his information added to various online databases of medical practitioners, which helped him fill out his faux resume.
[00:34:07]  Right after he got caught and loudly proclaimed that the newsmen covering his case would all see it was just a misunderstanding, he disconnected his phone and put up a Facebook page claiming he had stage two kidney cancer.
[00:34:19]  Then he took down his Facebook entirely.
[00:34:21]  Yeah, dead like 18, something like that.
[00:34:24]  Yeah, I don't think so, bro.
[00:34:27]  Malachi was sentenced to 28 months in jail.
[00:34:30]  And in the interim period where his case went forward, he left the state of Florida illegally and tried to buy a $35,000 Jaguar in Virginia, accompanied by a very old woman he was planning to trick into buying the car for him.
[00:34:43]  Oh, God.
[00:34:44]  When questioned, he varyingly identified the woman as his mother and godmother.
[00:34:48]  And like, it was such an obvious scam that I think it's like the car dealers who turn him in and like, if you're too shady for a car salesman, holy shit.
[00:35:00]  You got to really be doing some that's like, that's like a guy at a gun store not selling you a gun.
[00:35:06]  You have to have, you have to be really, really putting out bad vibes.
[00:35:13]  Where was it?
[00:35:14]  Where was it?
[00:35:15]  This is in like Virginia.
[00:35:17]  Oh, wow.
[00:35:18]  A used car dealer somewhere in Virginia was like, no.
[00:35:21]  Maybe it wasn't used.
[00:35:22]  I don't know.
[00:35:23]  Yeah.
[00:35:23]  Nope.
[00:35:24]  Not going to do it.
[00:35:25]  Not going to do it.
[00:35:26]  And this is why we're not going to be able to do a whole episode on Dr. Love.
[00:35:29]  He gets caught very early, right?
[00:35:32]  He flew too close to the sun.
[00:35:34]  And now he's kind of, he's dropped out of the medical stuff and he's just another incompetent serial scammer.
[00:35:39]  Obviously, prison did not help him.
[00:35:42]  You know, whatever he had that made him want to do this in the first place, it just made worse.
[00:35:46]  And now he's like fucked up, probably because prison's traumatic.
[00:35:51]  And he just, so he just keeps doing other scams.
[00:35:53]  He gets released in 2020 and he's immediately arrested again for trying to defraud his new employer by having like payments from shipping companies diverted to his private account.
[00:36:03]  It was all, these are all like bad cons.
[00:36:05]  And like, I read one article with a quote from him where he's just like sobbing.
[00:36:09]  He's like, sorry, please don't send me back to jail.
[00:36:12]  It's a fucking bummer because like this, what this kid did is fucked up, but he was also 18.
[00:36:16]  And like, clearly locking him up did not, it hasn't made it better, you know?
[00:36:21]  Like, I mean, I'm torn because on one hand, if I wasn't a doctor, I might appreciate this, you know, little rascal for what he's been up to.
[00:36:28]  But it's not a rascal.
[00:36:30]  It's bad.
[00:36:30]  Yeah.
[00:36:31]  Yeah.
[00:36:31]  He's, but he is a naughty, naughty young man.
[00:36:34]  Yeah.
[00:36:35]  And to use what little goodwill we still have as doctors and abuse it makes me very upset.
[00:36:42]  So it is.
[00:36:43]  It is.
[00:36:43]  I'm having a, I'm torn.
[00:36:44]  I'm torn on this one, but I am sort of glad that he is at least a name that people hopefully recognize and can Google and can be like, this guy is full of shit.
[00:36:54]  I mean, that's certainly important.
[00:36:55]  I just am also like, well, fuck, locking him up.
[00:36:58]  He just keeps doing cons.
[00:36:59]  Like, what do you like?
[00:37:00]  Clearly, whatever the solution, if you want, if the solution is this kid is not able to like do cons anymore, you're left with either just put him, lock him up forever, which doesn't seem right, or something else.
[00:37:13]  I don't really know what that else is, but putting him in jail for two years did not stop him from trying to hurt people.
[00:37:18]  It does seem like the fact that he is now kind of a famous con artist has made it easy to catch him.
[00:37:25]  Yeah.
[00:37:25]  So that's clearly part of like publicizing this is clearly part of the solution, right?
[00:37:30]  Yeah.
[00:37:31]  Anyway, when I first came about this story, and the next one we're going to talk about, which is much more severe, much more severe.
[00:37:37]  Oh my God, it's one of the worst things I've ever heard of in the medical profession, Kava.
[00:37:42]  Again, I was just going to cover these as kind of, here's like a potpourri episode of some fake doctors.
[00:37:48]  But both of these people we're going to talk about today, Malachi and the frauds we're about to discuss, got away with what they did because they abused the NPI system.
[00:37:58]  And that tickled something in the back of my brain.
[00:38:00]  And as I started digging around, I came to a realization, but I want to, I'm going to take you to that process organically.
[00:38:06]  I just want people to know there's something more here.
[00:38:09]  This is not just going to be like an assortment of fucked up tales, right?
[00:38:13]  So the next place we're going to go is the tragic story of the Jenkins family, Sherry Ann and Oliver.
[00:38:21]  Now, Oliver was a real doctor, the only one we will be talking about in this episode, right?
[00:38:27]  He was an ENT, ear, nose, and throat specialist.
[00:38:31]  But that, you know, you got to stare down a lot of people's nasty throats to do that job, right?
[00:38:35]  And more importantly, doing that does not pay enough for the comfort of Mrs. Sherry Ann Jenkins, right?
[00:38:42]  This is going to be a problem for her.
[00:38:44]  You know, it's not a bad saying gig, though.
[00:38:46]  I'm curious.
[00:38:46]  I'm not sure.
[00:38:46]  It's not a big, you're right.
[00:38:48]  You think you could live very comfortably, especially since Sherry Ann is not a medical doctor, but she is a PhD.
[00:38:54]  Now, I can't say in what.
[00:38:55]  I haven't found any evidence as to what, but like real newspapers cite her as being a PhD.
[00:39:02]  She's a live church.
[00:39:03]  Yeah, maybe universal live church.
[00:39:05]  I don't know.
[00:39:05]  She was born in 1959.
[00:39:07]  And in November of 2013, when she was around 54 years old, she and her husband started a section.
[00:39:13]  So her husband works for the Toledo Clinic.
[00:39:16]  That's how it's named in like the court filings.
[00:39:19]  And they started a cognitive center at the Toledo Clinic.
[00:39:22]  So you've got this real clinic where there are multiple real doctors doing real procedures and really treating patients.
[00:39:29]  And her husband, a real doctor, starts a cognitive center there.
[00:39:33]  Now, you might think that's a little odd because he's an ENT doctor, right?
[00:39:38]  The ear, nose, and throat are important, but they are notably not the brain.
[00:39:42]  I'm waiting to see how they connected this.
[00:39:45]  Yeah.
[00:39:46]  But I think Sherry Ann is, she has like some, like her PhD is in like some sort of neuroscience sort of thing, but it's not like she's not, again, not at all a medical doctor.
[00:39:56]  So Sherry is the one who's actually doing all of the work at the cognitive center, but she's using her husband's practitioner number, his NPI number, to invoice Medicare.
[00:40:06]  Now, she is doing the exams herself.
[00:40:10]  She is doing the treatment herself.
[00:40:12]  She is prescribing medicine herself.
[00:40:14]  She's just using her husband's NPI number.
[00:40:16]  That alone is several kinds of fraud.
[00:40:19]  Super bad.
[00:40:20]  Not supposed to be doing that.
[00:40:21]  Super bad.
[00:40:22]  People go to school for this sort of thing.
[00:40:24]  Yeah.
[00:40:24]  I mean, and doctors will work with nurse practitioners, physicians, assistants.
[00:40:30]  They work with non-doctors.
[00:40:32]  But you don't work with a PhD who has no medical training to do these things.
[00:40:37]  Exactly.
[00:40:37]  Especially when you're talking about like weird cognitive, rare cognitive things, it's very likely that you would have a real doctor who might work with someone who's got like a PhD in neuroscience, and that person would contribute to them figuring out what to do.
[00:40:49]  But the doctor is still the one doing the diagnosis and whatnot and filing these things.
[00:40:56]  From what I can discern from past reporting and court records, the actual scam here was very simple, very simple and very vile.
[00:41:04]  The Jenkinses found out that one of the things Medicare pays really well for is ordering PET scans and diagnosing people with Alzheimer's.
[00:41:14]  Like it's a good payment that you get for doing these things, right?
[00:41:19]  So because the Medicare rates for these, the tests that you have to do this are pretty good.
[00:41:24]  And because most people find Alzheimer's the most terrifying diagnosis imaginable, if you tell them that they have Alzheimer's, they will immediately agree to whatever kind of ongoing treatment you tell them they need to take, right?
[00:41:36]  But in part because they're just kind of overwhelmed with the numb shock that comes with getting diagnosed.
[00:41:40]  Like that is a your life, at least in the way most people see it.
[00:41:43]  I'm sure there have been, I dealt with, I have a family history of, well, we thought it was Alzheimer's.
[00:41:48]  It tended to be Louis Body, but for the whole time that she lived with us, we thought my grandmother had Alzheimer's.
[00:41:53]  They looked very similar.
[00:41:54]  So I'm aware of like how jarring this is and what a kind of a disorienting thing this is, especially if you're younger when it happens, right?
[00:42:02]  So they seem to be taking advantage of both of these facts.
[00:42:04]  Number one, the rates that we get for doing the tests to diagnose Alzheimer's are really good, right?
[00:42:10]  And number two, if you tell someone they have Alzheimer's, it shocks them enough that they don't think too much about what else you're going to start asking them, right?
[00:42:19]  These two things are kind of key to the con.
[00:42:23]  So I guess it's possible that Sherry Ann is to some extent deluded about her capabilities, right?
[00:42:29]  That she really thought that she was diagnosing some of these people because some of the people she diagnosed with Alzheimer's did turn out to have Alzheimer's.
[00:42:38]  Now, that's not so weird, nor does it really hint that she was actually, you know, more competent than you might think, because this is a cognitive clinic that specialized in people who are having like memory issues, right?
[00:42:48]  And if that's your business, a decent number of the people who come to you will, in fact, have Alzheimer's, right?
[00:42:53]  Yeah.
[00:42:54]  But what's important is that while some of the folks she diagnosed did have the thing she diagnosed them with, she was giving out the diagnosis like candy to basically everyone who came in with any kind of memory issue, right?
[00:43:07]  And not only was she billing for the tests that would have been necessary if you were looking for Alzheimer's, she would bill for tests that were unnecessary, even if that is what you were doing.
[00:43:16]  And she was not actually performing these tests, right?
[00:43:19]  Now, telling someone that they have Alzheimer's when they don't is one of the worst things that you can do to a person.
[00:43:27]  And this quote from an article in the Chicago Tribune gets across how disorienting her diagnoses were to the patients that she was tricking.
[00:43:34]  Quote, Sean Blasek knew a string of concussions from high school football and boxing was catching up with him.
[00:43:40]  He would go days without sleeping and was forgetting how to tie his shoes.
[00:43:43]  Still, at age 33, he was stunned after being told he had Alzheimer's disease.
[00:43:47]  He started planning out who would take care of his four kids if something happened to his wife, and he thought about how hard it would be for them when he could no longer recognize his family.
[00:43:55]  So he stuffed fistfuls of sleeping pills into a bottle and wrote himself a note, vowing to swallow all of them if he wasn't able to remember the names of his children.
[00:44:04]  Oh, Jesus.
[00:44:05]  That is fucking devastating.
[00:44:08]  Because again, it's one of these situations.
[00:44:11]  It's one of these situations where there is like this gray zone where it's hard.
[00:44:15]  A lot of times these neurological diagnoses are really difficult to deal with.
[00:44:19]  Of course.
[00:44:19]  And that's why we have neurologists, like specifically and psychiatrists too, who specifically work in these areas.
[00:44:27]  And again, when there's any sort of doubt, when there's any sort of question, these people come in and they fill that space.
[00:44:34]  And that's, oh, it's so terrible.
[00:44:36]  33-year-old trying to end his life if he has one bad day.
[00:44:41]  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

=== Devastating Suicide Note Found (03:29) ===

[00:44:43]  It's a fucking nightmare.
[00:44:44]  But you know what's not a nightmare, Kava?
[00:44:47]  I'm going to guess it's the wonderful products and/or services that support this program.
[00:44:54]  That's right.
[00:44:54]  We are sponsored by the concept of not being a professional boxer.
[00:44:59]  So please avoid that.
[00:45:02]  It turns out it's very bad for you.
[00:45:08]  I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
[00:45:11]  I said, Hi, Dad.
[00:45:13]  And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
[00:45:20]  This is badass convict.
[00:45:22]  Right.
[00:45:23]  Just finished five years.
[00:45:25]  I'm going to have cookies and milk.
[00:45:27]  Come on.
[00:45:29]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
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[00:46:13]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:46:21]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:46:30]  If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pitches, it's like, what?
[00:46:35]  Today, now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:46:39]  They believe everything.
[00:46:39]  But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:46:43]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:46:46]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:46:50]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:46:53]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:46:54]  They do not have homes.
[00:46:55]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:46:58]  Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:47:07]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[00:47:16]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[00:47:23]  I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
[00:47:27]  This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
[00:47:38]  If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
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[00:48:01]  Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

=== Metabolic Activity Debatable (15:10) ===

[00:48:12]  We're back.
[00:48:13]  What if instead of face punching, boxing was all dick punches?
[00:48:18]  I wouldn't.
[00:48:18]  Is there any way that could go back?
[00:48:20]  Yeah, that seems like a better, better show, right?
[00:48:22]  Yeah.
[00:48:23]  I mean, no chronic traumatic encephalitis.
[00:48:26]  There's no like, you know, connection to Parkinson's, as far as I know.
[00:48:31]  Yeah.
[00:48:31]  I think just as long as they're okay with the fact that they're probably not going to have kids, just punch each other in the dick a lot.
[00:48:37]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:48:38]  Just dick punches.
[00:48:39]  Mike Tyson and Jake Paul of the funniest thing they can do right now.
[00:48:43]  I would pay so much money to watch that fight.
[00:48:46]  That would be Mike Tyson would just evaporate Jake Paul's joke.
[00:48:51]  It would be gone like when you blow on one of those flowers that's got a million little seats.
[00:48:58]  Dandelion.
[00:48:58]  Yeah, dandelion.
[00:49:00]  Do you guys ever watch the slap fights?
[00:49:02]  Like where people like slap each other?
[00:49:04]  Yeah, it's like farm lessons.
[00:49:05]  Great slaps.
[00:49:06]  Yeah, sure.
[00:49:07]  That's insane that that's a thing that happens.
[00:49:10]  That's so, I see a couple of these videos where they get so hard that they start to like get into these weird like positions.
[00:49:16]  Okay, well, this one is bad for you.
[00:49:18]  Yeah, like, I think they're having like brain damage.
[00:49:20]  Like actively, you can see from like the seizures they're having.
[00:49:23]  It's terrible.
[00:49:25]  Sports are fun.
[00:49:26]  I think we should go.
[00:49:27]  I just found out it used to be an Olympic event.
[00:49:29]  It was dueling where you would shoot like wax bullets at each other and you would wear like protective vests.
[00:49:34]  I think we should go back to that.
[00:49:35]  I feel like there's no, yeah, why not?
[00:49:37]  Why not watch people shoot each other on television with guns that can't kill them?
[00:49:42]  Much better than punching each other's faces until their brains melt.
[00:49:46]  Yeah, I'm listening.
[00:49:47]  I'm open to it.
[00:49:48]  Yeah, let's do it, folks.
[00:49:50]  Anyway, we're back, folks.
[00:49:51]  Director.
[00:49:52]  Absolutely.
[00:49:53]  Well, another of the Jenkins' victims is Deborah Schmidt.
[00:49:57]  Deborah was diagnosed in 2015 by Sherry with Alzheimer's.
[00:50:02]  Now, one of the things you noted is that, like, this is tough.
[00:50:05]  These are not diseases that we have a great handle on.
[00:50:08]  So mistakes get made.
[00:50:10]  And Deborah did what you should do in that situation.
[00:50:13]  She went to another doctor for a second opinion.
[00:50:16]  First, she goes to another guy who works at the clinic, I think that she had just worked with before, James Auberl.
[00:50:22]  And she was like, hey, I don't think I have Alzheimer's, but this guy or this lady says I do.
[00:50:26]  And James counseled her to go back in and is like, well, you know, I'm sure that the clinic is a real clinic.
[00:50:34]  So you should probably just like keep going in.
[00:50:36]  So she goes back to the clinic and she does a cognitive test.
[00:50:40]  And Sherry Ann is like, yeah, you've definitely got Alzheimer's.
[00:50:44]  Even more this time.
[00:50:45]  I chose to get it.
[00:50:45]  Even twice.
[00:50:46]  Even more.
[00:50:46]  Super Alzheimer's.
[00:50:48]  Now you have mega Alzheimer's now.
[00:50:50]  And then says, if you want to slow the advance, the only thing that could help is coconut oil.
[00:50:56]  Oh, man.
[00:50:56]  Come on.
[00:50:57]  People.
[00:50:59]  I know everyone falls for a scam.
[00:51:01]  I believe it.
[00:51:02]  I believe there's a scam for everybody.
[00:51:04]  I believe it for sure.
[00:51:05]  Come on.
[00:51:06]  Look, there's a lot of great things about coconut oil.
[00:51:08]  It tastes good.
[00:51:09]  I think it's relatively heart healthy.
[00:51:11]  Don't quote me on that.
[00:51:12]  Yeah, I mean, if you want to cook with it, fine.
[00:51:14]  It's not going to cure your Alzheimer's.
[00:51:16]  Now, I did look into this because I was like, I hadn't actually heard of this.
[00:51:19]  I was like, is this like a thing in like bullshit medicine circles?
[00:51:22]  And it sure is.
[00:51:24]  And the explanation for this is that there is a substance contained in coconut oil, caprylic acid, that may be useful as part of a treatment for Alzheimer's.
[00:51:35]  Studies are ongoing.
[00:51:37]  And medicine that contains caprylic acid is in stage two clinical trials.
[00:51:42]  Now, number one, that doesn't mean that it works, but number two, that's not the same as coconut oil halting Alzheimer's, right?
[00:51:48]  This is a super important point.
[00:51:50]  And if I could just make a quick stop.
[00:51:53]  What'll happen a lot in medicine is you'll see a headline.
[00:51:55]  They'll say like, this spice will help with this cancer.
[00:52:00]  And where in reality, it's like maybe some component that's in this food or this spice may have something in it that if taken out and produced in a different way and given to you in the right way, might, if the studies show it.
[00:52:12]  But in reality, for example, everyone talked about turmeric, how it helps your liver.
[00:52:17]  But in reality, like there is one component of it that does seem to help.
[00:52:20]  But when you take it, it gets broken down into an inactive component that doesn't help your liver.
[00:52:25]  So taking it like orally, taking it for food, great.
[00:52:28]  These things are oftentimes harmless.
[00:52:30]  Sometimes they are harmful, but usually they're harmless.
[00:52:33]  But the studies aren't necessarily there yet to prove that they help.
[00:52:37]  In this case, this acid, if it's studied and it shows to be helpful in specific ways, it won't be getting it through coconut oil.
[00:52:45]  It'll be like through like a compound of it that's really in high quantities that you could take.
[00:52:49]  So it's not to be when you read these headlines that say something like, you know, oh, eating this blank thing will help your diabetes.
[00:52:58]  I mean, there might be some kernel of truth to it, but it's a long way from that to something clinically important.
[00:53:04]  I beg people to keep that in mind.
[00:53:07]  It's the thing like people only do this with foods, right?
[00:53:09]  Because if you hear, hey, they found a spider in the Amazon that's that's venom is going to can be like we think will be part could be used to like make a cancer treatment, right?
[00:53:19]  Well, you understand that what that means is that there's some compound in the venom that when isolated and added probably to a cocktail of other compounds might be useful in some sort of cancer treatment.
[00:53:29]  You don't believe, well, if I've got cancer, I need to fly to the Amazon and get that spider to bite me, right?
[00:53:35]  That's not, but if you hear that like a compound and fucking avocados might be a useful part of a cancer treatment, you'll always get grifters being like, don't go to the doctor for your cancer, eat a million avocados.
[00:53:46]  And no, that's not how avocados work.
[00:53:48]  That's not how cancer works.
[00:53:49]  Please don't do this.
[00:53:51]  Exactly.
[00:53:52]  And that is the case with this, right?
[00:53:54]  There is no evidence whatsoever that coconut oil itself can stop or halt the progression of Alzheimer's.
[00:54:00]  A lot of this myth took off in 2015, which is the year that this is happening.
[00:54:04]  That's why she says it, right?
[00:54:05]  Because it was in vogue then.
[00:54:07]  And it's in vogue thanks to Dr. Mary Newport.
[00:54:10]  Dr. Mary Newport started claiming that a regimen of coconut oil had given her, quote, a few extra good years with her husband after he was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's.
[00:54:20]  I am sure Mary's case is very sad, but there is no evidence to support the claim made on the website us against Alzheimer's when it covered her story.
[00:54:28]  Quote, what if a spoonful of coconut oil each day were all it took to reverse or slow down the symptoms of Alzheimer's?
[00:54:34]  Now, there is research as to whether or not just coconut oil itself might have a positive impact on Alzheimer's.
[00:54:42]  Research does not mean evidence.
[00:54:44]  It means research.
[00:54:46]  I found a 2022 article on CTV News announcing the start of a study by the Health Bird Alzheimer's Institute to study the impact of coconut oil versus a placebo on 65 Alzheimer's patients.
[00:54:57]  That article notes that it is the first clinical trial of its kind, but also admits there is currently no clinical data showing the benefits of coconut oil on the prevention and treatment of dementia.
[00:55:07]  Newport, whose husband Steve was diagnosed with Alzheimer's at age 51, said she began to see improvements after yada yada yada, right?
[00:55:14]  So that's all there is right now.
[00:55:16]  There is a study that has not, we have no evidence on, and there is no actual evidence that just coconut oil helps.
[00:55:23]  Is this lady felt like it helped her husband?
[00:55:26]  And I don't have any problem with like, yeah, sure, do a study, right?
[00:55:29]  See if you find anything.
[00:55:31]  I do have a problem with blasting the internet with like, take a spoonful of coconut oil.
[00:55:35]  Now, if you're also doing treatment, you know, and you just add a spoonful of coconut oil, sure, if that makes you feel better, there's no harm to it.
[00:55:42]  You're not going to, you're not going to damage anybody by giving them a spoonful of coconut oil each day, but like, don't do it in lieu of medical treatment.
[00:55:49]  Right.
[00:55:50]  Yeah.
[00:55:50]  And don't also pretend people have Alzheimer's when they're not.
[00:55:54]  If I could also add one thing to that for listeners, if you ever feel like you need to get a second opinion, do so.
[00:56:01]  Yes.
[00:56:02]  You're not going to offend your doctor.
[00:56:03]  Like every doctor has a patient go seek a second opinion.
[00:56:06]  That is okay.
[00:56:07]  We want what's best for we supposed to want what's best for you.
[00:56:11]  And if some other doctor has a better idea of how to do that, we're all for it.
[00:56:16]  So if you feel like some you and sometimes it's even if you like what the doctor's telling you, but you still want to get another opinion, we understand if a doctor doesn't get that, that's on them.
[00:56:27]  That's weird.
[00:56:28]  And most of us will get it.
[00:56:29]  Yeah, it's one of those things like, yeah, it's probably unreasonable to go to a second opinion if you've got a flu or whatever.
[00:56:34]  But like Alzheimer's is a big deal.
[00:56:36]  And like I said, like they misdiagnosed my grandma.
[00:56:38]  Now, given the state of Alzheimer's and Lewy body treatment in the early 2000s, I don't think it would have made a difference.
[00:56:44]  Like, like you're not going to like give them, like, we just, we just didn't have a good handle on either of them.
[00:56:49]  You know, that's just the reality of the situation.
[00:56:52]  So I don't know if Ms. Schmidt, who's the woman who's gotten diagnosed with Alzheimer's by Sherry Ann and then told to take coconut oil.
[00:56:59]  I don't know if she like googled around and was like, there's no fucking evidence that this shit is an Alzheimer's treatment.
[00:57:04]  But, and I kind of think that's what happened because she refuses to take it, right?
[00:57:08]  She's like, no, I'm not going to fucking take your coconut oil.
[00:57:11]  I don't trust your diagnosis.
[00:57:13]  Sherry Ann Jenkins reported her as non-compliant in her official paperwork and chastised Schmidt, then billed Medicare $1,267 for the visit.
[00:57:24]  Now, I found Schmidt's experience chronicled in a lawsuit against the Jenkinses, filed on behalf of Schmidt and others by the United States government.
[00:57:31]  This is not super important, but it is very funny to me how this lawsuit opens.
[00:57:35]  Now comes the United States of America, buying through relators Deborah A. Schmidt and Mary Kay Smith for their complaint state and aver the following.
[00:57:44]  I just love that United States of America.
[00:57:50]  310 pounds and six foot seven, baby.
[00:57:54]  Wow.
[00:57:56]  So the good news here is that Schmidt did seek a second opinion.
[00:57:59]  She did not just take Jenkins's diagnosis, which is why, again, it's important to do that.
[00:58:05]  And in fact, a team of doctors at the Cleveland clinic see her and they're like, what the fuck is this Jenkins lady talking about?
[00:58:11]  You're fine, right?
[00:58:12]  And in fact, it's such a like she goes to one doctor and eventually a whole team of them look her over and are like, yeah, there's, you have, you don't have Alzheimer's, right?
[00:58:21]  You're just kind of old and forgetting a couple of things, but like, you know, there's no evidence of Alzheimer's.
[00:58:26]  So when she learns this, she goes back to the Toledo clinic and she tells that neurologist she had been talking to, Dr. Aubrell, hey, Jenkins fucked up, to which the good doctor replied, I don't even want to hear that woman's name.
[00:58:38]  Now, this is a story that's more worth more reporting.
[00:58:41]  I'd really like to see a good documentary about this case.
[00:58:44]  I'm sure one will come out eventually because I don't really fully know how there's, you certainly get, you certainly can see that like over time, some of the other doctors at the clinic outside of the cognitive clinic realize something shady is going on.
[00:58:58]  I don't know if they're aware.
[00:59:00]  I don't think they're aware that she is actually diagnosing patients and carrying out tests, right?
[00:59:06]  Because she's using her husband's NPI and she's not supposed to be doing that.
[00:59:10]  But they seem to be aware that like she's full of shit.
[00:59:14]  So another client is Mary Smith.
[00:59:16]  Mary sees an article on the Toledo's cognitive clinic made up as part of a PR blitz by the clinic that the Jenkinses were running, right?
[00:59:25]  Mary had been concerned about her memory and she saw an ad in a local magazine that claimed Sherry Ann used, quote, neurocognitive testing coupled with PET CT scans that allowed her to see what part of a brain is functioning well and design protocols for each patient.
[00:59:39]  Wow.
[00:59:40]  I'm not a doctor.
[00:59:41]  That's sad.
[00:59:41]  Is that more or less how it's supposed to work, right?
[00:59:43]  That seems like basically how it's supposed to work.
[00:59:46]  PET scans for Alzheimer's.
[00:59:48]  So that's not how it's supposed to.
[00:59:50]  See, I'm not the doctor here.
[00:59:51]  So that's not right.
[00:59:52]  I mean, I'm not a neurologist.
[00:59:53]  So it's a bit out of my wheelhouse, but CT scans for sure.
[00:59:56]  I don't, I mean, interesting.
[00:59:58]  You can make you, if you could make an argument like what activity is lighting up, what metabolic activity lights up.
[01:00:05]  So a PET scan will look at metabolic activity.
[01:00:07]  So if you're looking for cancer, for example, you like do a PET scan and it'll light up in certain parts of your body where there's lots of metabolic activity, lots of things turning over like a cancer would do, lots of growth, lots of turnover.
[01:00:19]  So I don't, maybe they do it for the brain.
[01:00:21]  I don't know.
[01:00:22]  I'd have to ask a neurologist, but it seems like very hand-wavy.
[01:00:26]  What's important for this story is that they're lying about doing those tests in large part because using those machines is expensive.
[01:00:34]  You get to build Medicare for them, but it's still like a thing, right?
[01:00:37]  And you don't, your clinic usually does not have one, right?
[01:00:40]  Maybe the whole clinic has access to one, but like your little cognitive center, you don't have your own.
[01:00:45]  And it seems like the Jenkinses are trying to avoid kind of interacting with the rest of the Toledo clinic as much as possible.
[01:00:51]  So when Smith comes in, instead of giving her a PET or a CT scan, she gives her a verbal test, tells her she's failed, and then she finds an old MRI scan of Smith's brain that was just on file at the clinic, not a current one, and diagnoses her with Alzheimer's based on that, right?
[01:01:10]  So that's all a little shady.
[01:01:12]  It's all very shady.
[01:01:13]  I'm sorry, just to cut in, because I just looked up real quick.
[01:01:16]  So it looks like, because there's different types of PET scans, the type that we normally look at is called FDG, which is like the concentration of glucose and looks at like metabolic activity.
[01:01:26]  So the one you apparently can use, again, a neurologist is going to correct me on this one for this is amyloid PET to measure the buildup of amyloids, like a protein that can build up.
[01:01:36]  It's one of the key hallmarks of Alzheimer's.
[01:01:38]  So it can look for buildup of this protein.
[01:01:41]  So there is a use for a specific type of PET CT scan.
[01:01:45]  Okay.
[01:01:45]  Okay.
[01:01:46]  Yeah.
[01:01:46]  And I had to get that out there.
[01:01:48]  No, no.
[01:01:48]  And after this, she orders a real PET scan for Smith.
[01:01:52]  And this, again, shows why she didn't like to do that because it puts Smith in the same room as a real doctor, the attending radiologist, right?
[01:01:59]  And the radiologist does the PET scan is like, hey, you know, this isn't my wheelhouse, but like everything looks fine to me.
[01:02:04]  You know, just like you should have your doctor look this over because they're supposed to be the expert.
[01:02:08]  But from what I can see, it doesn't look like you have Alzheimer's.
[01:02:11]  So Smith goes home and is like, whoo, that's a load off my mind.
[01:02:15]  The radiologist said I'm probably fine.
[01:02:17]  And then later that night, Jenkins calls her at home and is like, the radiologist was wrong.
[01:02:21]  You've got the HIMERS.
[01:02:22]  You got to come back tomorrow and bring your whole family with you.
[01:02:26]  Do doctors not say you've got the HIMERS when they're diagnosing Alzheimer's, Connor?
[01:02:30]  They should, if I'm in fair, it's not bad.
[01:02:33]  And she's like, yeah, bring in your whole family.
[01:02:36]  They all need to be here, right?
[01:02:37]  Because you can't trust your brain no more.
[01:02:39]  So Smith does this and she tells her family and brings them in.
[01:02:43]  And Jenkins like sits her down.
[01:02:44]  She's like, you have Alzheimer's.
[01:02:46]  And she tells her family, you all have to take care of her now, right?
[01:02:50]  She can't be on her own.
[01:02:52]  You know, you're no longer an independent person.
[01:02:55]  Also, I'm going to have to do a telephone consult with you every three weeks and an office visit every three months for the rest of the time that she's alive.
[01:03:03]  And of course, Sherry Ann, this is the situation she wants to lock every patient into because that means you get to bill like $1,600 for every one of these visits.
[01:03:13]  And that's a really regular income stream.
[01:03:15]  She's just locked in medical gaslighting at 20-some grand a year for herself just with that one patient.
[01:03:21]  There's gaslighting at the highest level.

=== Family Forced to Care for Mother (14:25) ===

[01:03:23]  It's like amazing.
[01:03:24]  And there's no real cost to the clinic, but Sherry's time, right?
[01:03:27]  Because this is just this person coming in and being told, hey, take some fucking coconut oil, right?
[01:03:33]  So she effectively, and again, obviously you can see if you, if you can do that with 10 people, 200 grand a year, 20 people, 400 grand a year, right?
[01:03:40]  Like this is, this is like a sizable amount of money that you can make doing this in addition to the upfront cost, which is probably in the 10 to 20 grand of just like getting them diagnosed.
[01:03:51]  But it also, what you're looking at here, if you're talking about on a one-to-one basis, she is upending and destroying people's lives for about the price of a nice used car every year.
[01:04:03]  Like that's that's what's actually going on here.
[01:04:06]  So here's what the court case against the Jenkinses lists as the prescription she gave this woman for Alzheimer's treatment.
[01:04:13]  S.A. Jenkins prescribed Smith take six teaspoons of coconut oil per day, an all-organic GMO-free diet and daily exercise.
[01:04:21]  S.A. Jenkins advised Smith she only had three to five more years left to work before the disease would take its toll and requested that Smith and her husband volunteer at the Alzheimer's Adult Daycare so they could see where Smith was heading in the near future.
[01:04:33]  That's horrible.
[01:04:35]  Do you want to know what I bet you she was doing?
[01:04:38]  She was setting the groundwork for the fact that, because I don't think she really believed this.
[01:04:41]  I'm getting the sense that this is all a scam.
[01:04:43]  She's not like a true believer and just is deluded about her abilities.
[01:04:48]  But like what she's probably hoping to do is to be like five years down the road, be like, I guess the treatment's really helping.
[01:04:57]  Oh man, now that that would be hope.
[01:05:00]  Thankfully she doesn't get to that point, but I'm a really good doctor.
[01:05:04]  That would be, that would be kind of funny.
[01:05:08]  So Oliver Jenkins, the actual doctor, again, and her husband, Charian's husband, never saw Smith and he never saw most of the people that his wife was diagnosing.
[01:05:18]  Obviously, Smith is distraught when she gets this diagnosis.
[01:05:21]  And she also thankfully seeks a second opinion from a real doctor who looks at her and is like, this doesn't look like Alzheimer's to me, but hey, we'll do a PET scan just to make sure.
[01:05:31]  And oh, yeah, still no Alzheimer's.
[01:05:34]  But because this guy's a real doctor, he's like, you know what?
[01:05:37]  You have one positive diagnosis.
[01:05:39]  I showed nothing, but let's bring a third doctor in just to be really sure that you don't have Alzheimer's, right?
[01:05:45]  So he refers her to yet another doctor who backs up the confirmation that she's fucking fine, right?
[01:05:51]  The Toledo clinic had billed Medicare $4,036 for this bullshit diagnosis.
[01:05:57]  So Smith is furious, right?
[01:05:59]  But at this point, she's also like, well, maybe I just ran into a bad doctor who like fucked up, right?
[01:06:04]  Like it's not clear from one case as the individual.
[01:06:07]  Is this lady just like shitty at her job or have I fallen into some elaborate scheme?
[01:06:12]  So when Sherry Ann calls her and is like, hey, so when are you coming in for your every rest of your life visits?
[01:06:19]  You know, to get told to take coconut oil, you got to let me treat you.
[01:06:23]  Smith is like, fuck off.
[01:06:25]  We're not going to you anymore.
[01:06:27]  So Nada Dr. Jenkins sends Smith a letter, quote, our physician-patient relationship is ineffective and I can no longer continue to provide services to you as your provider.
[01:06:36]  Therefore, this letter will serve as notice of my intent to discontinue our physician-patient relationship.
[01:06:42]  Now, this seems to have rubbed, that does seem, is that something you do?
[01:06:46]  I've never done that.
[01:06:47]  I've never.
[01:06:48]  Okay.
[01:06:49]  I mean, I'm trying to think if I've ever fired, for lack of a better word, a patient.
[01:06:54]  And maybe it was like one time when I got threatened by somebody who was not quite, you know, in a good place.
[01:07:00]  So they, and that might be the only time, but I didn't write them like a letter.
[01:07:04]  I don't, I don't think we do that very commonly.
[01:07:06]  No, and this isn't even that because this is the patient says, I'm not going to go to you anymore.
[01:07:10]  And you send them a letter firing them, which is like weird and petty.
[01:07:14]  Yeah.
[01:07:15]  It's like weirdly, it's like babblingly petty.
[01:07:17]  The response, the correct response is, I'm sorry.
[01:07:20]  I hope you find someone who treats you right.
[01:07:22]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:07:24]  So this seems to have rubbed Smith the wrong way getting this letter.
[01:07:27]  So she goes to the radiologist at the Toledo clinic.
[01:07:30]  So at the broader clinic that the cognitive clinic that the Jenkins's run is at.
[01:07:34]  And she's like, hey, you know that PET scan you did that seemed I was fine.
[01:07:39]  Well, here's what happened afterwards, right?
[01:07:41]  So this radiologist tells her, oh yeah, all of the radiologists at the Toledo clinic went to the executive board recently to lodge an official complaint that Jenkins does not know what she's doing.
[01:07:52]  Their complaint included the line, she has diagnosed everyone with Alzheimer's.
[01:07:57]  And then in the court case, after this is announced, there's an utterly baffling paragraph that I'm hoping you can help me make sense of, Kabe.
[01:08:05]  The radiologist also stated that S.A. Jenkins had misdiagnosed his own 21-year-old daughter with Alzheimer's disease.
[01:08:11]  He further stated that he had destroyed all of the medical records pertaining to his daughter and recommended that Smith do the same with regard to her records.
[01:08:19]  What?
[01:08:20]  What's going on there?
[01:08:21]  Hold on, hold on, hold on.
[01:08:22]  I'm confused.
[01:08:22]  So the real Dr. Jenkins, he the radiologist.
[01:08:27]  He diagnosed a radiologist's daughter.
[01:08:30]  Yeah.
[01:08:30]  No, Sherry Ann, the not real doctor, a wife who was not at all any kind of doctor.
[01:08:36]  Non-doctor.
[01:08:36]  Diagnoses the radiologist's 21-year-old daughter with Alzheimer's.
[01:08:41]  And then the radiologist said, I destroyed all of the medical records pertaining to my daughter from that case, and you should do the same.
[01:08:49]  Why would you do that?
[01:08:50]  It does not seem like there's any good reason to do that unless he was somehow in on the scam.
[01:08:57]  I don't understand.
[01:08:58]  Why would you, you would never do, first of all, you never destroy medical records.
[01:09:01]  Like it's one of those things where like the lie is worse than the actual act.
[01:09:06]  You're not supposed to, you just can't do that.
[01:09:07]  It's just like, we're not supposed to do that.
[01:09:11]  Why would a radiologist take his daughter, a 21-year-old for why was the daughter so questionable?
[01:09:18]  Yeah.
[01:09:20]  Why would he not look at the images himself?
[01:09:23]  And why would he not feel like 21 is sort of, I mean, there is early onset Alzheimer's.
[01:09:28]  Yeah.
[01:09:28]  Come on, 21, you're a doctor, man.
[01:09:31]  Something fishy, something clearly like something.
[01:09:33]  Yeah, I mean, he is saying that like he and a bunch of others went to the clinic leadership and said, this person's a scammer.
[01:09:40]  So it seems like he reckon, and I kind of, I kind of suspect the thing with his daughter could be as simple as like, maybe there's a work party, right?
[01:09:48]  Was he using his daughter who we knew was like super healthy as like a test to catch the meds?
[01:09:55]  Maybe that's it.
[01:09:56]  I also think it could be like, maybe there's like a work party and Jenkins runs into his daughter and just like in the process of a conversation diagnoses her with Alzheimer's because she's slip into my CT scan over here for a moment.
[01:10:09]  Yeah.
[01:10:09]  Yeah.
[01:10:09]  I don't know.
[01:10:11]  Whatever it is, sketch.
[01:10:12]  Again, I know we have like a bunch of professional journalists and TV people.
[01:10:16]  Here's a great, this is like a solid six episode Netflix documentary, right?
[01:10:21]  Like you could, or at least a good tight 90 minutes, right?
[01:10:24]  Like somebody do, because I want, there's a lot of questions I do have about this still unanswered.
[01:10:28]  Yeah.
[01:10:29]  Hire Robert and I just to be the CT.
[01:10:31]  Yes.
[01:10:32]  Absolutely.
[01:10:32]  Oh my God.
[01:10:33]  We'll choose so much scenery.
[01:10:35]  Absolutely.
[01:10:36]  Yeah.
[01:10:36]  And bring in Pedro Pascal to be, I don't know, somebody.
[01:10:39]  I just want to have lunch.
[01:10:40]  Bring him in to be 20.
[01:10:41]  Bring him in to be the daughter.
[01:10:42]  And Lee Pace can be Smith or someone.
[01:10:46]  I just want to have one really good lunch out of this project, people.
[01:10:49]  That's the most you thing that has ever been said.
[01:10:52]  The lawyer in this case is David Zole.
[01:10:55]  And as part of his claim against her, he noted that at least 30 people were misdiagnosed and aware of it, right?
[01:11:01]  That like we have tracked down 30 people who were told they had Alzheimer's and didn't, which is, you know, potentially like 600 grand a year, right?
[01:11:08]  Ongoing visits and stuff conservatively.
[01:11:11]  But also, he's like, that's just who we know.
[01:11:14]  This lady, they were doing this for four years.
[01:11:16]  There's an unknown number of people that may have been diagnosed by her, right?
[01:11:19]  A lot of these people are old.
[01:11:21]  There's a good chance a non-trivial number of people died thinking they had Alzheimer's, you know?
[01:11:25]  But we're just like, they were like 80 when they came in, right?
[01:11:28]  So they didn't have a lot longer.
[01:11:30]  Unraveling who was told what has proved to be a difficult process.
[01:11:34]  And Zole claims there's, and again, that's the lawyer, claims there's also evidence that Sherry Ann overbilled patients for the fake care she was giving them in addition to faking their care.
[01:11:44]  His take was that she's simply greedy, right?
[01:11:46]  Their cognitive center grew a lot faster than anyone expected, and it made a lot of money for the larger Toledo clinic.
[01:11:52]  And I think to the extent that there's maybe some weird shady stuff going on, right, that's sort of insinuated in that paragraph, maybe the radiologists weren't able to get anything done to get her fired because clinic leadership was like, well, we don't really give a shit.
[01:12:03]  The money's coming.
[01:12:04]  I don't actually know.
[01:12:06]  What really sticks with me is how predatory the process was.
[01:12:09]  Sherry Ann and her husband were not just giving fake diagnoses to scam Medicare, they were outright like hunting people.
[01:12:17]  Zole claims, quote, many times she would see the first person and have them bring in their whole family, Zole said.
[01:12:24]  And many times she would diagnose the whole family, right?
[01:12:27]  Because Alzheimer's can be, can have a genetic component, at least.
[01:12:30]  I don't know that it always does, but like there are people for whom it runs in the family.
[01:12:35]  So she's like, your whole family needs to get tested.
[01:12:37]  And then boom, boom, boom, boom.
[01:12:39]  Everybody's got Alzheimer's, you know?
[01:12:41]  She's like doing the Oprah-free car thing, but we fucking got Alzheimer's.
[01:12:45]  You have Alzheimer's.
[01:12:46]  Yeah.
[01:12:47]  You know, and unfortunately, this process is not just reckless and cruel.
[01:12:52]  It's deadly.
[01:12:54]  And I'm going to quote now from reporting in the Chicago Tribune.
[01:12:57]  Kay Tainer was diagnosed with Alzheimer's on her second visit to Jenkins and then referred five or six friends and family members to her office, including her husband of 48 years.
[01:13:06]  All were told they had the disease, she said.
[01:13:08]  But her husband, Gary, took it hardest.
[01:13:11]  He's got a smile that just lights up the room and I never saw it again, she said.
[01:13:14]  He just sunk in his chair.
[01:13:16]  To me, he never stood up again.
[01:13:18]  He was never tall again.
[01:13:19]  He gave up.
[01:13:20]  Gary fell into depression, spending his final weeks sitting in a chair with his hands in his lap until he went into their garage and shot himself in the head.
[01:13:28]  She said, An autopsy did not show any signs of Alzheimer's.
[01:13:32]  So this monster, I mean, early Alzheimer's, again, I'm not a neurologist, but my general understanding is that it's, I think, under the age of like 65.
[01:13:44]  And there is like a familial onset Alzheimer's, but it is really rare.
[01:13:50]  And it's like probably less than like 1% of the total cases that you're going to see.
[01:13:55]  And like for her to take advantage of this and give these people these crushing diagnoses, because things have gotten a little bit better and we do have new medicines kind of coming down like the pipeline, but it's still a really bad thing to get, especially in earlier ages.
[01:14:11]  It's so, it's so cynical, so callous that they would do it to make, I mean, I don't know.
[01:14:17]  I know this is so stupid and I'm like on the wrong show to ask this, but how do people live themselves when they do something like that?
[01:14:23]  Like, I don't understand like the how that, how in her mind, she was probably the victim that she's the hero of her own story.
[01:14:31]  Yeah, everyone is, but how is she spinning this?
[01:14:34]  That's the part I don't understand.
[01:14:36]  You know, part of me is like, maybe it was a long con and she's like, it won't really hurt them.
[01:14:40]  I'll tell them they're cured and then I'll start selling fucking all of or not all of it, coconut oil supplements.
[01:14:46]  I don't know.
[01:14:48]  But maybe it is just like, I don't care about people and I want money.
[01:14:52]  You know, that is sometimes the answer.
[01:14:55]  Maybe she was deluded, right?
[01:14:57]  Maybe there's some sort of mental illness she's got going on.
[01:14:59]  But honestly, I feel like that's probably less likely than just like this person was a monster.
[01:15:05]  Yeah.
[01:15:06]  I don't know.
[01:15:07]  But I mean, you know, at this point, I don't know that we'll, maybe if somebody does a deeper reporting on it, we'll get, you know, I did everything I could.
[01:15:13]  I read like the court cases and stuff, but this is a Dr. Death-like podcast.
[01:15:20]  Someone's got to turn this into that.
[01:15:21]  Yeah.
[01:15:21]  Yeah.
[01:15:21]  Please do, folks.
[01:15:23]  I want to know more about this.
[01:15:25]  So the lawsuits against the Jenkinses inspired an investigation by the FBI, right?
[01:15:30]  And once they start snooping around, it's over pretty soon for Oliver and Sherry Ann.
[01:15:34]  These people are not criminal masterminds.
[01:15:36]  They have not hidden their tracks very well.
[01:15:38]  The feds press charges as all these civil cases wind through the court system, and the Jenkinses are indicted by a grand jury.
[01:15:45]  More than 60 patients and family members who had been inaccurately diagnosed would ultimately come forward.
[01:15:51]  USA Today notes that in addition to Gary's suicide, one patient took a six-month leave of absence from work and lost her job.
[01:15:58]  Another retired early and lost his retirement benefits.
[01:16:01]  One man sold his house so that he could move to be next to his children.
[01:16:05]  Another client was placed in a nursing home.
[01:16:08]  The good news is that both Jenkinses were found guilty of conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, and healthcare fraud.
[01:16:15]  Sherry was fined $25,000.
[01:16:18]  Oliver was fined $25,000.
[01:16:21]  Both were sentenced to time in prison, 71 months for Sherry and 41 months for Oliver, which is, you know, I don't know what the right sentence is, but those are both real sentences.
[01:16:31]  You know, I'm assuming he probably lost his license.
[01:16:34]  Oh, God.
[01:16:35]  Yeah.
[01:16:36]  You would assume, right?
[01:16:37]  No, that's that's the good long-term solution for that.
[01:16:41]  I assume that the civil cases are going to take a lot of money out of these people's hides, right?
[01:16:45]  Yeah.
[01:16:46]  Yeah.
[01:16:46]  And that's all a huge bummer, right?
[01:16:48]  Much more of a bummer than Malachi's story, which is like kind of sad that he's ruined his life a little, but like more, mostly just like, wow, what a shithead, right?
[01:16:58]  This is really fucking sad.
[01:17:00]  But it also, you know, again, I want to note, because we're going to come to this in part two, these stories are not isolated incidences.
[01:17:07]  They are all in fact tied together in a certain way.
[01:17:11]  And specifically, they are tied together to a series of things that explains why your healthcare is so expensive, why it is so hard to get seen, and why it is hard to find in-network care when you need it.
[01:17:24]  All of this relates to why the Jenkinses were allowed to do what they did.
[01:17:28]  And that's what we're going to talk about in part due.
[01:17:31]  But first, Cave.
[01:17:33]  Yeah.
[01:17:34]  Do you speak French?
[01:17:36]  I'm going to take that as a yes.
[01:17:38]  What do you, where do you, where do you go?
[01:17:41]  Who are you?
[01:17:42]  What do you do?
[01:17:43]  Je sui de San Francisco.
[01:17:46]  That means I'm from San Francisco.

=== French Podcaster from San Francisco (02:50) ===

[01:17:48]  Je sui un doctor et un podcaster.
[01:17:52]  That's French for I am a doctor and a podcaster.
[01:17:55]  And that's the extent of my French.
[01:17:57]  I have a podcast called The House of Pod.
[01:18:00]  You can find it anywhere you listen to podcasts.
[01:18:02]  You can follow me if you like on Twitter at the House of Pod.
[01:18:07]  I just started making TikToks because I'm a complete sellout bitch.
[01:18:11]  I love it.
[01:18:12]  No, because you're an outlaw.
[01:18:13]  I'm crazy.
[01:18:15]  And I do a little bit of medical stuff there, talking about like medical topics that people are interested in.
[01:18:21]  And the show is fun.
[01:18:22]  If you like sort of delving into bastards of medicine, we do a little bit of that, but we also talk some of the good stuff about medicine.
[01:18:29]  We talk about what's new and hot, and we'll have fun guests.
[01:18:33]  Like I have an upcoming show with the guy from Eve Six and Dr. Peter Hotez to talk about COVID.
[01:18:39]  So that'll be fun.
[01:18:40]  So the guy from Eve Six is my primary care physician.
[01:18:46]  He's pretty savvy.
[01:18:47]  So I wouldn't put it past him.
[01:18:49]  He's pretty cool.
[01:18:51]  But so, and of course, Robert's been on the show.
[01:18:53]  So yeah, listen to it.
[01:18:55]  I think you'll like it anywhere you do your podcast.
[01:18:57]  Check it out.
[01:18:57]  Check it out.
[01:18:59]  And you know, interesting fact, Kave, the French language actually has more than 30 different words for podcaster.
[01:19:06]  That makes sense.
[01:19:07]  And they all are something to do with like les petite mou, I think.
[01:19:10]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:19:11]  That's right.
[01:19:12]  That's one of them.
[01:19:13]  Anyway, everybody, go to hell.
[01:19:15]  I love you.
[01:19:19]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:19:22]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com.
[01:19:26]  Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:19:35]  On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Paul Show are geniuses.
[01:19:40]  We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
[01:19:47]  Better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
[01:19:50]  Yes.
[01:19:51]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[01:19:54]  I actually, I thought it was.
[01:19:55]  I got that wrong.
[01:19:56]  But hey, no one's perfect.
[01:19:57]  We're pretty close, though.
[01:19:58]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:20:06]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[01:20:14]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[01:20:23]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[01:20:26]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
[01:20:31]  Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

=== iHeart Country Festival Tickets (00:34) ===

[01:20:38]  Saturday, May 2nd, country's biggest stars will be in Austin, Texas at our 2026 iHeart Country Festival presented by Capital One.
[01:20:47]  See Kane Brown, Parker McCollum, Amanda Unique, Riley Green, Shabuzzi, Dylan Scott, Russell Dickerson, Ben and Mee, Gretchen Wilson, Chase Matthew, Lauren Elena.
[01:21:04]  Tickets are on sale now.
[01:21:06]  Get yours before they sell out at Ticketmaster.com.
[01:21:09]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:21:12]  Guaranteed human.