[blueash]

Sadly Phil gave air time to some dangerously misinformed people. He regularly had on anti-vaccine group especially one calling itself DPT named for the shot but as Disatisfied Parents Together. They pushed their pet theory that the DPT caused Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. It didn't. But he had them on repeatedly and never presented the truth or challenged them.

He also loved having on Dr Doris Rapp who claimed that people were allergic to all kinds of common things and only she and her other "clinical ecologists" had the skill to diagnose and treat these allergies. She was a huge pusher of food allergies as causing behavior problems and treated all her patients with allergy drops which she concocted.

As a resident at the hospital in the city in which she practiced I had the pleasure of being paged stat to the lab where they were doing a glucose tolerance test on a young teenager. Dr Rapp had told the family, per their relating to me, that the teen was allergic to glucose and that is why she was doing poorly in school. So of course to prove this she needed a glucose tolerance test. Makes no sense, don't ask me.

Anyway, the family was told she might react to the glucose in the test and she would get dizzy or sweaty or short of breath and to have the house staff resident called and give the doctor a paper with instructions to handle this emergency. The instructions were to immediately inject a specified amount of sodium bicarbonate from the crash cart to reverse the acidity. That would stop her anaphylaxis.

So I got a tube of sterile saline from the crash cart and pushed it into her IV line after drawing a couple tubes of blood for testing. Within seconds the teen felt great. Except I hadn't given her bicarb, just more saline just like was running in her IV already. Her blood work came back normal, no acidity.

I called Dr Rapp to tell her that her patient had exactly the reaction she predicted would occur during the glucose tolerance test and she happily informed me that the doctors in the hospital never believed in her methods and she was so glad I had gotten to see she knew what she was doing. I then told her I didn't follow her orders and instead gave saline and it "reversed" the problem, which her blood tests said never existed anyway. And that I had informed the family what I did and that they might have questions when they saw her again.

When Dr Rapp accused me of not following her orders I told her that I had the bicarb in hand had the saline failed but I was not willing to give a drug which has known risks unless I was sure it was needed. She was welcome to report me. She did and I was thanked by the department chief for my actions.