#2789: Robert Charles Dumont

[yes, we’ve mentioned him before, but he deserves a separate entry]

 

In 2014, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation finally took action against DAN! doctor and general quack Anju Usman, director of True Health Medical Center in Naperville and owner of Pure Compounding Pharmacy, for (a long history of) subjecting autistic children to “unwarranted, dangerous therapies”. Usman was fined, ordered to take additional medical education classes, placed on probation and forced to have her work reviewed. Unfortunately, Usman also got to influence the decision on which doctor was to review her work, and the task was assigned to Robert C. Dumont, with the likely consequence that Illinois children will continue to suffer from dangerous quackery for years to come.

 

Dumont is indeed a pediatrician, but pediatrics in the US has long been plagued by quackery, and Dumont is also member of the Raby Institute for Integrative Medicine at Northwestern and an acupuncturist. In fact, Dumont offers an array of “integrative” approaches, including homeopathy, no less. One would conclude that Dumont would not be an ideal candidate for the position of supervising someone with a tendency to offer quackery, but Dumont has, nefariously, also been involved in multiple efforts to whitewash quackery; in 2015, for instance, he testified at an FDA hearing in Bethesda on the regulation of homeopathic remedies, and he has been caught shilling for Boiron, a leading manufacturer of homeopathic remedies and quackery, as an expert witness. At the FDA hearing, Dumont testified, falsely, that homeopathic remedies are “exceptionally versatile and efficacious for many medical problems” and that he has “prescribed homeopathic medicines in the hospital for premature infants”, as well as used it for “nausea, vomiting and losing weight” for a patient undergoing chemotherapy. A poster he wrote with Youngran Chung (apparently his wife), ‘Homeopathy, an Effective, Practical, and Safe Therapeutic Approach: Principles, Evidence and Examples of Practical Application’, similarly gives you an idea of his aptitude for research (and honesty): the poster does emphasize, a number of times, that “homeopathy is an extremely safe modality” (which, even though it’s water, is only partially correct) but doesn’t, despite the promise in the title, even try to indicate that it is effective for anything, since it so obviously isn’t.

 

Dumont is, in particular, using homeopathy for autism quackery – precisely what Usman above was sanctioned for – as demonstrated for instance by his presentation on “Use of Clinical Homeopathy in Autism Spectrum Disorder” at the International Conference of Clinical Homeopathy in Los Angeles.

 

Diagnosis: Utterly delusional and at least a potential danger to people around him. That he is allowed to offer advice to people with medical conditions, including children, is a travesty.