Key takeaways

Patients throughout Georgia are getting injections or receiving IV infusions of hydrogen peroxide, compounded vitamins, peptides or stem cells, or breathing in high concentrations of oxygen.

Their hope: slow or reverse aging; restore libido; or overcome autism, Alzheimer’s diabetes, cancer, arthritis, Parkinson’s and more.

Hundreds of Georgia storefronts and clinics are promoting these unproven and risky treatments, with nary a word of warning from state medical regulators and few actions against practitioners even if they mislead patients, put them at risk or violate the law.

Lax oversight by a medical board that is one of the nation’s weakest is allowing practitioners to play by their own rules, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found. And those practitioners now have a powerful ally in Washington, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.