Age Management & Autism Treatment: Business Opportunities?
April 15, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
This is from the April 15th New York Times:
For four days last December, America’s pleasure dome in the desert, Las Vegas, played host to a convention dedicated to the proposition that [X] is “a treatable medical condition.”
Booths advertising vitamins, hormones and pharmaceutical drugs, along with an array of oxygenating or detoxifying paraphernalia, filled the exhibition hall of the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino.
What do you think [X] is?
The Autism Research Institute (ARI) has its “Autism Is Treatable” campaign. Autism is described as a “treatable medical illness” by Jaquelyn McCandless, M.D..
But it’s not autism the New York Times article is talking about. [X] is aging.
The title of the article is Aging: Disease or Business Opportunity?. Regarding the “business opportunity” aspect of those proffering alternative “anti-aging treatments,” the New York Times notes that “authorities have indicted 20 people, including four doctors, in three states as part of an investigation into what federal and state prosecutors describe as a booming and illegal trade: Internet trafficking in human growth hormone and anabolic steroids.” The two osteopathic physicians in Chicago, Ronald M. Klatz and Robert M. Goldman, that the New York Times article focuses on have not been mentioned in these indictments; they are the founders of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (according to which “aging is fatal”) and also have a website, The World Health Network. In addition to noting that Dr. Klatz and Dr. Goldman “have grown wealthy through their stewardship of the academy and as leading anti-aging evangelists,” the New York Times also notes:
Both men received medical degrees in 1998 from the Central American Health Sciences University in Belize, without, they acknowledged, ever having studied in the country. Dr. Klatz and Dr. Goldman say through their lawyer that they earned their medical degrees with transfer credit from previous academic work and a year in clinical rotations in Mexican hospitals.
Licensing authorities in Illinois did not recognize the Belize degrees, and in 2000 fined the doctors $5,000 each for adding M.D. after their names. They agreed to a cease-and-desist order with an exception: books already printed or being reprinted with the contractual requirement that they be identified as M.D.’s. They were also allowed to continue using the M.D. designation on their résumés.
Naomi Loomis, the chief executive of a compounding pharmacy, Signature Pharmacy, is quoted at the end of the New York Times article about the “age management business”: Might we also speak about the “autism management business”? Or just the “autism business”?
And, in regard to some treatments, such as chelation, that some use to “treat” autism, perhaps it might also be well to ask: “Autism: Treatment or Business Opportunity?”
The subject of my post – one Dr Imam – is also big on anti-aging, as is Rashid Buttar. Lots of these guys are equal opportunities scammers.
Being someone who is very interested in *actual* longevity research — the kind that actually has some potential leading to better medical care for elderly people — I am all too aware of the amount of quackery that runs rampant in what is referred to as “the anti-aging marketplace”. That marketplace has been around for almost as long as culture has existed — I was looking at a Sears catalog published in 1910 recently, and there were entire pages devoted to creams, powders, and even bizarre devices that were supposed to “restore and maintain youth”. A lot of that stuff contained ingredients like arsenic and opium and such (and, might add, there were also ads for “calming syrup” marketed to mothers with fussy babies — most babies, it seems, slept quite noiselessly when given an infusion of alcohol and narcotic!).
Nowadays, we have things like “human growth hormone” and high-dose antioxidants, and even some weird stuff being advertised in magazines like Scientific American (which I generally tend to see as fairly reputable) that is somehow supposed to repair mitochondria. Anyone with any reasonable knowledge of biology ought to be able to dismiss such things without much of a thought, but most people don’t have that kind of knowledge.
Aging is a very complex phenomenon, and the only way it’s ever going to be addressed in the context of medical care is through complex means. I’m probably a bit out-of-the-mainstream in my views on longevity medicine, but I definitely don’t subscribe to any notions that you can order weird herbal pills from a magazine that will keep you from developing age-related conditions.
Also, as I blogged about recently, I think it’s very important to keep in mind the difference between things that kill you and things that don’t kill you. Aging kills people. Autism is not in any way incompatible with good health OR happiness. It’s pretty clear which one I think ought to be the subject of “treatment” research. I don’t think old people stop being valuable just because they are old, and it’s just plain discriminatory to suggest that we ought to find ways to prevent and treat heart disease and cancer in younger people, but that the elderly people just stop mattering after a certain point.
However, I am concerned about the degree to which the “cost” of elder care is frequently invoked in discussions of longevity research. I don’t think we need to focus on longevity research for the sake of the economy, I think that a focus on longevity research should be motivated by a valuation of individual lives and a refusal to just “give up” on someone because they are old, and because of the strong cultural inertia that seeks to confine everyone’s life to a particular pattern (you are born, you grow up, you work, you retire, you die). People fighting for longevity research actually have more in common with neurodiversity and disability rights advocates than not, and experience similar kinds of hostility, because of the very insistence that there’s more than one viable pattern for a life to take.
I just think it’s important to avoid, say, lumping the desire to address age-related mortality and illness with the desire some people have to “cure” or prevent autism. The civil rights position here that is most consistent, in my opinion, is the one which states that autistics have the right to exist as autistics, and that elderly people have as much right to lifesaving medical care as younger people (and that nobody should ever be considered “disposable” or “expendable”). I don’t really see any difference between supporting the “old people should just be left to die because it’s natural, it’s part of the circle of life” position and supporting euthanasia.
But yes, quackery is a problem, in both autism AND longevity research. I’m annoyed at the scammers and snake-oil salespersons preying on people in both cases.
“Autism: Treatment or Business Opportunity?”
An important and appropriate question indeed. As always, thank you for your informative and thought provoking posts.
Melody: Thanks— I’d actually like to devote a post to “the business of autism,” which seems only to grow and grow.
Anne C, thank you for your perceptive comment—-it was the similarities of “quack” sorts of treatments for anti-aging and for autism that I wanted to highlight, not aging and autism in particular. From living with my in-laws—who are both elderly and have a lot of health problems of various sorts—and taking care of Charlie, so many similiarities have arisen. My mother-in-law has had some health issues that, due to her age, some have felt not worth the effort of addressing and my husband has had to advocate hard (an understatement) to get them for her. I’ve seen the same tendency to think it necessary to “give up” on the elderly and the disabled both in regard to some of her issues and to Charlie’s. Thanks for giving me lots of food for thought.
Kev, thanks, always.
it was the similarities of “quack” sorts of treatments for anti-aging and for autism that I wanted to highlight, not aging and autism in particular.
Yes, I picked up on that — I just wanted to state my position for the record. And the situation you’re describing with your in-laws is exactly the sort of thing that I’m concerned about from an ethical standpoint; I know of several older people who have had trouble getting doctors to take them seriously and treat them. Age discrimination in medicine is as rampant as disability discrimination; there’s far too much “writing people off” going on and I don’t like it.
But back to the quackery thing: there’s a really great old book I have called the “Encyclopedia of Superstitions” (by E. & M.A. Radford) which I’d highly recommend to anyone seeking historical context for the ways in which humans have tended to approach confusing phenomena. For example, prior to the discovery of the true cause of rickets (Vitamin D deficiency), parents would go out and split an ash-sapling, and pass their child through the split three or nine times. I’m sure that in some cases, the child seemed to recover afterward because of a change in diet (perhaps on account of seasonal food availability), but the parents felt like they had to be “doing something” regardless of whether there was any serious evidence for its efficacy. Quackery, of course, works on that same principle.
Also (and this is going a bit off-topic now for this post, but is still on-topic for this blog), there’s another section in the “Encyclopedia of Superstitions” on the significance of numbers. One commonly-held folk belief for a long time was that (from page 249):
…an individual’s whole body and mind change completely every seven years, and that quite dramatic alterations can sometimes be looked for at the end of such periods. Within this [20th] century, mothers of unmanageable naughty children have been heard to say that they were not worried because they knew there would be a great (and apparently, an automatic) improvement in the children’s behaviour as soon as they reached the age of seven.
Makes me wonder whether this numerical superstition could have arisen due to an observation that development is often nonlinear; I know, at least, that that’s commonly the case in autistics.
While I don’t question whether such claims or industries are erroneous or unethical, I wanted to clarify that Dr. Klatz and Goldman ARE licensed PHYSICIANS in the United States. While they are being cited for using the MD degree without proper licensure in the states, both do hold D.O. degrees (Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine) from United States medical schools. This degree is the medical and legal equivalent of the MD degree. That being said, it is suspicious that such DOs would attempt to “buy” an MD degree from another country’s institution and therefore they hinder the progression of osteopathic medicine and its true purpose: Treating people in a holistic manner through the use of traditional medicine with additional musculoskeletal and manipulative techniques.
@Robert Smith,
Thank you. If I may ask, have you used any of the treatments that the doctors are described as using?
Not for those purposes, no. In fact, most of my colleagues would agree that such treatments have still failed to show any dramatic results or to be studied in large scale clinical trials, so it would be against my better judgement to try such therapy when the benefits have still failed to outweigh the potential complications.