"Mercury Bob"

When I saw that we would be discussing MS, I knew I had to save my most amusing blog posting for last (I also had to get permission from a former Medical Director for the EMS agency I was working with at the time to talk about this.) I went on a poisoning call about ten years ago to a location near to Ft. Huachuca (About which I shall remain vague) for a patient we can call Bob (Which was, of course, not his name.) Bob had multiple sclerosis (MS) and was certain he could find a cure. He was not unknown to the local EMS providers and police. He had been living with MS his entire adult life and it was a crap-shoot who was taking care of whom between him and his mother in the trailer they lived in. This was in the days when the Internet was in its infancy, and Bob spent most of the time tying-up his phone line on his dial-up modem. He even hung up on the dispatcher because he needed to “Get back on the BBS to find out what to do” now that he was feeling ill from his “treatment” (Some of us will remember that the BBS system pre-dated the modern Internet.)

Since they couldn’t get back a hold of Bob, we went to his place as fast as possible with a Sheriff’s deputy escorting us. When we arrived, we found a makeshift chemistry lab, sandwich bags full of all kinds of herbs and powders, and Bob furiously banging away at his keyboard looking like he was about to seize. We managed to get him to stop the conspiracy talk long enough to tell us that he had developed a “cure” for MS that he was planning to market that involved, among other things, mega-doses of zinc. He said his cure was designed to “Chelate (Which he mispronounced) all of the toxic mercury from his body that was killing his nerves.” He also stated that he had recently had all of his dental fillings removed to “Get rid of the mercury poison.” When we asked him how he came up with his seaweed and zinc potion, he said he learned about it from a guy in India on a BBS group for MS patients (One of the firefighters on the scene tried to tell him that they probably didn’t have modems in India at that time and he got agitated.) He was extremely mad that his mother had called us and was convinced that the state he was in was related to the “Natural process of getting rid of mercury.”

We took him to a local hospital and he presented the entire way with really bizarre tremors that looked like mini-convulsions. I’ve never seen anything like it since and the receiving doc said he’d never seen it before. The grand irony was that Bob almost got his chelation therapy; it just would have been for the zinc he had poisoned himself with rather than the imaginary mercury. They flushed him with fluids and, I’m told, tested him for mercury levels which came back completely normal (Though Bob wasn’t buying it.) The frightening thing about all of this is that it was long before the Internet evolved. Imagine the barrage of false information a newly-diagnosed MS patient faces today. I did a search for “Multiple sclerosis” and “Cure” and the top hit was a pseudo-science website; searching for MS and “Natural therapy” brings back almost 49 million hits, most all involving quackery, and several that discuss that same nonsense that Bob was trying almost a decade ago…it’s frightening just how persistent misinformation can be!