Yesterday I came across one of the most appalling examples of medical child abuse that I have ever read.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Dosing an autistic child with bleach is the modern day equivalent of beating the demons out of her.[/pullquote]

Hi everyone I NEED HELP! My daughter is 7 years old been on cd [chlorine dioxide: bleach] for 4.5 months and began her third pp [parasite protocol] this month. A week ago I began double dosing because she hits her head and gets irritated when her little sister speaks loudly, which causes her to want to head butt her. I did 38 drops a couple of days ago and she seemed fine and my husband, forgetting, gave her 36 drops on the first day of pp. So yesterday I did 38 drops and she kept going to bathroom and refused to eat. I was a little concerned when she didn’t want to finish her lunch and kept and eye on her. When dinner time came, I have her mebendazole [anti-parasite medication] she started gagging so I gave her some almond milk and had her sit on the couch. After 5 minutes I gave her her late bite of dinner and not eneve a minute passed when she threw everything up…

Yes, this woman is dosing her autistic daughter with BLEACH. Why? Because a quack declared that autism is caused by parasites and that ingesting bleach and bleach enemas can kill those parasites. This was posted in a Facebook group that has thousands of members dedicated to treating autism with bleach.

You don’t need to be a physician to know that bleach is toxic and these parents are literally poisoning her daughter. This is the worst kind of medical child abuse imaginable and sadly her ignorant parents are abusing her not because they don’t care about her but because they do. They, like many people who lived before the existence of science, are laboring under pre-rational beliefs about health and illness. They are following in a long tradition of ascribing psychiatric and neurological illness to demons and seeking to drive the demons out. They’ve just dressed it up with the thinnest veneer of science, calling the demons parasites and poisoning the child to drive them out instead of beating her or burning her.

Human beings love stories. They tell stories to remember, stories to teach and stories to explain. Prior to the advent of science, there was often no way to explain illness — particularly neurological and psychiatric illnesses — and stories of demonic possession were often invoked. It seemed the perfect explanation for otherwise health individuals behaving in strange ways. Not surprisingly, since suffers were perceived to be invaded by demons, the “cure” involved driving demons out.

Such immature cognitive errors — ascribing disease to paranormal phenomena — are understandable in the absence of science, but, tragically, many people revert to these immature cognitive errors when confronting diseases for which the scientific explanation is still incomplete. Autism is such a disease and many parents are still in the grip of pre-rational beliefs about it.

Poisoning autistic children with bleach to drive out the parasites is only the worst of these pre-rational beliefs. Though vaccine-refusing and vaccine-hesitant parents boast that their “research” shows that vaccines cause autism, this is just another thin scientific veneer over the pre-rational belief that autistic children have been possessed by demons; in this case the demons are vaccines. And for some parents, driving out the demons involves spending vast amounts of money on useless “detoxing” treatments. Vaccine refusal and hesitancy aren’t the result of being educated; they’re the result of being superstitious.

Psychiatric and neurological illnesses like autism aren’t caused by demons — whether those demons are paranormal beings, parasites or vaccines — and therefore they can’t be treated by beating demons out of children or killing parasites and they can’t be prevented by refusing vaccines. Those practices are nothing more than medical abuse and neglect.