Jeff Bradstreet
James Jeffrey "Jeff" Bradstreet, was an American doctor, alternative medicine practitioner and preacher, who ran the International Child Development Resource Center in Melbourne, Florida, as well as homeopathic medical practices in Buford, Georgia and Arizona. He also founded the Good News Doctor Foundation, which aimed to combine Christian beliefs with medicine. Bradstreet is best known for promoting the false claim that vaccines cause autism, as well as various discredited or unproven alternative treatments for autism.
Education and career
Bradstreet obtained a Florida medical license in 1984. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of South Florida in 1976, where he also went to medical school beginning three years later. His postgraduate research focused on aerospace medicine, and he received his training in this field from Wilford Hall Medical Center. He was an adjunct professor of child development and neuroscience at the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine in Tempe, Arizona.Autism claims and treatments
Bradstreet published autism research, which he claimed indicated vaccines as a cause, in the fringe partisan Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, which is not indexed by PubMed. This research claimed that autistic children had a higher body burden of mercury, and that three autistic children had measles RNA in their cerebrospinal fluid. It is scientific consensus that there is no link, causal or otherwise, between vaccines and autism.Bradstreet treated autistic child Colten Benevento with chelation therapy, hoping to remove excess mercury from his body, in spite of the fact that hair, blood, and urine tests had failed to show he exhibited abnormal levels of mercury. Over an eight-year period, Benevento visited Bradstreet's office 160 times. Quackwatch founder Stephen Barrett stated, "It appears to me that Bradstreet decides which of his nonstandard theories to apply and records diagnoses that embody them." Barrett also labeled the tests used by Bradstreet to search for excess mercury in the body "phony." Pediatrician Peter Hotez characterized Bradstreet's proposal to treat autism with chelation therapy as "dangerous." Chelation therapy has never been proven effective to treat autism and has sometimes resulted in death or other serious complications when improperly administered to autistic children.
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Bradstreet defended the use of intravenous immunoglobulin as an autism treatment, saying, "Every kid with autism should have a trial of IVIG if money was not an option and IVIG was abundant." Bradstreet also published research regarding the use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for autism, some of which concluded it was ineffective, as well as a paper arguing that autistic children have an increased vulnerability to oxidative stress. Further treatments Bradstreet used on autistic children included the controversial protein GcMAF, with which he claimed to have treated 600 children. In an article for an anti-vaccine magazine, Bradstreet endorsed stem cell therapy as an autism treatment. As of 2025, stem cell therapy has not been proven effective to treat autism.
Personal life and death
Bradstreet was found dead from a gunshot wound to the chest in the Broad River in Rutherford County, North Carolina in June 2015, after his Buford, Georgia medical office was raided by the Food and Drug Administration in connection with an investigation into GcMAF treatments. At the time of his death, he lived in Braselton and ran his medical practice in Buford. While the police declared Bradstreet's death a suicide, a conspiracy theory has spread holding that Bradstreet was murdered for his use of a "holistic" therapy.Bradstreet's son has been diagnosed with autism, which Bradstreet attributed to a vaccination his son received at 15 months of age.