The church--dubbed Genesis 2--focuses on proselytizing use of [Jim] Humble’s bleach solution, initially called Miracle Mineral Solution but now dubbed MMS. The Genesis 2 church “ordains” people at different levels of the church hierarchy, including as “ministers of health.” And it seems that in the last year or so, Humble has joined forces with two other people in this “church” to target the autism community, hawking this bleach solution as a cure for autism. Joining Archbishop Humble (I’m not making that up) in his goal to bleach the insides and outsides of autistic children everywhere are Bishop Kerri Rivera (a DAN! adherent, as well) and sidekick the Reverend Doctor Janet Henshaw-Hedlund, featured here in a video with Humble. The three have held a workshop in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico where the threesome provide direction to “treat” autistic children by having them ingest bleach to the point of vomiting and diarrhea, if not worse.

You can read about the claims they make about their solution at Science-Based Medicine, where Orac has taken apart a presentation that Bishop Rivera herself made at AutismOne 2012. Introduced by a woman wearing an “MMS Rocks!” t-shirt, Rivera gave her misleading, anti-scientific, bleach-shilling talk (video here; viewer beware) to what appeared to be a room that contained not a single dissenter, not one person who stood up to ask, “Really? You’re recommending that we use a bleach solution as an enema in autistic children? As a bath? As an oral ‘treatment’?”

You read that correctly. Bleach enemas to cure autism. The protocols the members of this trio recommend for the MMS treatment are just— traumatizing even to read. One calls for a “treatment” every two hours for 72 hours, “every possible weekend.” Humble writes of overcoming the “nausea barrier” to up the dosage. Evidently, a “therapy” that induces nausea and vomiting and fever and diarrhea is a “good” thing. And if you make up a “baby bottle” of it, that makes it seem even more innocuous--or insidious, depending on your perspective.

Any child who is subjected to this abusive and torturous treatment would find it more than insidious. Orac quotes a parent who writes about her non-speaking autistic teen that the boy can’t tell her how he feels as she doses him with the bleach solution. He vomits and has diarrhea “all day”; she writes that he generally has a “sensitive” gut. Another mother set up a blog to describe trying MMS on both her autistic son and herself, a sufferer of rheumatoid arthritis. It’s heartbreaking but also enraging to read her posts as they reveal more than she seems to see: Her son develops a sudden extreme fear of the bathtub, and she can’t seem to understand why, even though six days earlier, she wrote that they were about to try an “MMS bath” (i.e., a bleach solution bath; PDF of Humble’s protocol for that here) on him. Then suddenly, the blog ends with, “I cannot continue this blog. Sorry.”