#1045: William Rader

We’ll award an honorable mention to Johanan Raatz, the guy behind the Facebook group MemeShock and a variety of less-than-ideally well-hinged ideas propagated on Youtube, but he appears to be, overall, pretty marginal.

William C. Rader, on the other hand, is a genuine threat to human well-being. Rader is a psychiatrist whose main schtick is administering injections of human fetal stem cells in what he calls therapeutic treatments for a variety of illnesses. It is, of course, pure quackery, covered here, and of a particularly insidious type. His career into serious crankery seems to have taken real flight with his founding of the Immune Suppressed Institute in 1993, an HIV/AIDS treatment center in Mexico City – keep in mind that Rader has no expertise in anything remotely related to the issues – and with his first observation of a human injection of fetal stem cells in 1994 at a Ukrainian clinic. In 1995, he started administrating fetal stem cells to his own patients in Bahamas. and later the Dominican Republic after the Bahamanian government asked him to leave after what can diplomatically be called negative media coverage in the United States. His treatment has run into problems in the Dominican Republic as well, though he appears to be still running his company, Medra Inc., there.

None of his “results” have been published in medical journals, of course, and it is even very unclear what, exactly, he injects into his patients (no one else is allowed to look at his “cells”). His patients, many of whom are children brought to him by their parents, are not tested before or after by any scientific means, and Rader even admits that he has no idea how his therapy works – he says of the injection process that the cells he injects know exactly where to go, though “I’m not telling a cell where to go, because I have no clue where it should go. This is nature, God’s work. whatever you want to call it.” The word “imagination” seems like an apt choice, though others have suggested “snake oil”. Nonetheless, he has stated that he charges $25,000 for the initial treatment and $8,000 for each followup, and does claim that he is able to cure pretty much any ailment or illness known to man.

In 2010, Rader self-published another book titled Blocked in the USA: The Stem Cell Miracle, which does not even attempt to offer any evidence that his methods work, over and above scattered anecdotes. His anecdotes are, demonstrably, judiciously selected (also here).

Diagnosis: Another petty excuse for a human being. Disgusting.