Scandal: Just Brewitt in a bathtub.

Barbara Brewitt PhD has been a figure in "autism biomed". She gave a presentation at the last Autism One conference, it was called, Cell Signaling: Fundamental Role in Healing and Relevance to Autism. There were all kinds of quacky ideas presented at that Autism One conference, Brewitt was just one of those promoting homeopathy.

From the KOMO TV news story exposing Brewitt, titled, "We can make this stuff in a bathtub if we want to.":

"Biomed's cell signalers are being taken by autism and HIV (AIDS virus) patients as well as baby boomers who want to stave off aging."

The Department of Health ordered Brewitt to immediately "stop her unlicensed practice of manufacturing drugs," saying that they do not have the necessary federal approval.

Adler, who says he was hired to help establish a small manufacturing facility in Woodinville, says many of the medicines were mixed by Brewitt herself in her own kitchen as she chanted over a crystal bowl.

"She told all of us the magic is in the chanting and the crystal bowl," said Adler. "And that's what caused everything to work was the energy from the crystal bowl."

Huh? For some reason her web page of questions and answers about autism doesn't mention chanting, crystal bowls or the bathtub thing. Instead she writes:

The recombinant protein + buffer is brought up in solution as a source material and then serially diluted and vortexed to provide a homogeneous preparation. This is exactly the way that biochemists and researchers do it.

One might have thought that "vortexing" was the name of the crystal bowl and chanting process, except she says that,"this is exactly the way that the biochemists and researchers do it." Off hand, it's hard to picture biochemists in their kitchens chanting over crystal bowls, for any reason, but we could check with some biochemists and researchers here, and in Outer Mongolia, for example, to find out how they "vortex".

Homeopathy is just a bizarre idea. The regular old-fashioned recipes for homeopathic remedies are weird enough, but even those recipes don't involve chanting or crystal bowls or even crystal balls. Maybe that's a Northwest United States regional treatment. One hopes that Brewitt was faithful to the local spirits and used some kind of authentic Native American chant. Something that mentioned killer whales would be a nice touch.

To make homeopathic "medicine' the old fashioned method, you take a concentrated amount of something, say digitalis tea, or maybe a tincture made from the leaves of a foxglove plant and some alcohol.


If a person then doses himself or herself with some of that digitalis tea or tincture it would make his or her heart race, it might kill the person, but before it kills the person it would make his or her heart race.


According to the idea behind homeopathy, you take some of that digitalis juice and put it in a quantity of water in a jar and shake it. You take a small amount of that watered down digitalis and put it in another jar full of water and put the lid on it and shake it. Again, you take this a little of this digitalis mixture which is getting very diluted as you can imagine, and put it in a jar ful of water and.... you guessed it, shake it.

So you keep doing this. Each time you shake it the water takes on some kind of mysterious charge from the digitalis. And each time you dilute it the power of the stuff gets stronger. BUT, the power of the stuff is to do the opposite of what the original stuff did. So the digitalis charged water should slow your heart down.

Eventually, the sell this stuff that is just water that is supposed to carry the magical charge of the whatever it was they started with. As shown here.

Or, they can put drops of this stuff onto sugar pills and sell it to you in pill form.

Here's a quote from quackwatch:

A 30X dilution means that the original substance has been diluted 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times. Assuming that a cubic centimeter of water contains 15 drops, this number is greater than the number of drops of water that would fill a container more than 50 times the size of the Earth. Imagine placing a drop of red dye into such a container so that it disperses evenly. Homeopathy's "law of infinitesimals" is the equivalent of saying that any drop of water subsequently removed from that container will possess an essence of redness. Robert L. Park, Ph.D., a prominent physicist who is executive director of The American Physical Society, has noted that since the least amount of a substance in a solution is one molecule, a 30C solution would have to have at least one molecule of the original substance dissolved in a minimum of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water. This would require a container more than 30,000,000,000 times the size of the Earth.

Also see the transcript from a BBC TV news program where homeopathy was exposed as useless.

Back to Brewitt and her cell signaling cure for autism. Homeopathy gets discussed on the mercury parent, autism biomed bulletin boards and listservs from time to time and no one ever seems to challenge it. No one says, "What do you mean your child started talking in full sentences shortly after you gave him a sugar pill treated with water?" or, "How do you explain that your child totally changed after you gave him some drops of water 3 times a day?"

It's probably considered impolite to challenge some other parent's chosen "cure". It's also likely that no one on any of the lists has bothered to look into homeopathy with even the slightest bit of skepticism. Dr. Brewitt, knowing how gullible huge bunches of parents of autistic kids are and how some of them seem to have money to burn, took advantage of them. Will she be castigated by the folks at "Autism One"? Seems unlikely. People might start thinking critically about the other autism biomed scams.




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